The spark behind the birth of Vanguard passed away earlier this month, aged 88. Nick Thorndike might not be as famous as Jack Bogle, Vanguard’s actual founder, but he (inadvertently) played a pivotal role in its genesis. Short thread of recondite financial history: 1/n
Back in the 1950s, Nick Thorndike was a precocious fund manager at Fidelity, mentored by Ned Johnson himself. In 1960 he and three Bostonian friends set up their own shop, Thorndike, Doran, Paine and Lewis, which kicked arse in the “go-go” boom of the 1960s.
The go-go years were much tougher for more conservative investment groups, such as Walter Morgan’s Wellington. It ran a big, successful bond-and-stocks fund, but in the 60s boom people wanted GROWTH, not a boring “balanced” fund.
Just $93m is enough to lift bitcoin price by 1%, estimates Bank of America. Gold needs about 20x that net inflow.
The smattering of institutional investor/corporate announcements over the past year have helped pump the price of bitcoin, but Grayscale remains the dominant holder.
For decentralised money its pretty dang centralised. About 95% of all bitcoin are controlled by just 2.4% of accounts.
“Indexing doesn’t constitute any real threat to professional managers because its goal is mediocre performance.” Cleaning up some of my book research notes, and there are some 👀 quotes there.
(From the Boston Globe, august 24, 1976)
David Babson REALLY didn’t like the smell of this new fad.
Retail investors now accounts for almost as much US trading as all mutual funds and hedge funds *combined*. Our deep dive into the frenzy, how it differs from past retail trading booms, and whether this will prove a lasting phenomenon. ft.com/content/7a91e3…
Good piece on a really cool idea that unfortunately fizzled. Short thread on what I thought might have been the Achilles heel (which I didn’t appreciate enough when I wrote about the phenomenon a few years ago on.ft.com/3696uEP )
Basically, I think I (and Quantopian obviously) underestimated the compounding power of collaboration and institutional knowledge. Essentially, you probably had thousands of people independently coding very similar algos on large cap US equities.
But that is just ferociously difficult. If you were a novice quant joining say DE Shaw or Two Sigma and tried to find a way to trade S&P stocks, you’d get laughed at. All the simple stuff a novice might naturally try was thoroughly mined decades ago.
HELP! Can't decide what US cover to go with for my upcoming book on the history of index funds (out sept 2021) so I thought I'd throw it out to the hive mind. Poll below, and feel free to comments to explain (or to ask for smaller font, make fun of my weird name, etc etc).