Mark Shupe’s “The Moneyball Method”

Charlie Munger famously said, “It’s remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” Were he still with us, Munger might admit that when it comes to money, it takes a lot of intelligence or at least a lot of emotional intelligence to be “consistently not stupid.”

Just the same, the insights from the late multi-billionaire demand more knowledge attainment from all of us so that we can know what to do when perhaps it isn’t obvious. One aid in the human desire to be smart about money will surely be longtime wealth management and trust expert Mark Shupe’s new book, The Moneyball Method: A Middle-Class Manifesto for Objective Investing.

Shupe tells readers that “the Moneyball Method is most suitable for middle class and affluent investors who own brokerage accounts, retirement plans, trust accounts, bank deposits or annuities.” Shupe met and led the needs of just these kinds of clients at First Merit Bank (later Huntington National Bank), along with Morgan Stanley. It was while at these institutions that Shupe happened on the myriad fallacies associated with “best practices” on the matter of wealth management. Sensing customers were being misled by accepted wisdom, he turned his own “principles into practice.”

Why the Moneyball reference related to Michael Lewis’s much-revered book? It’s because as contrarian baseball mind Bill James explained it about baseball, “A great portion of the sport’s traditional knowledge is hokum.” Shupe feels the same way about money management. He sees an investment metaphor in Moneyball that can be applied to money, that “the natural world is orderly and knowable and you can choose to live in harmony with reality, or not.”

Shupe chooses reality, and aims to convey it to his readers. He tells them to “replace the stress and errors of predicting the future and beating the market with the resilience of objective data.” From there, he notes that “the objective investor chooses the destination and uses the historical data for the navigational chart.”

Put another way, markets themselves inform us about markets, including how to best hedge against the inevitable downturns in markets. In Shupe’s words, “market prices fluctuate, market leadership changes – and that is guaranteed.” The only add here to Shupe’s wise words is something he might agree with: markets gain strength from times of weakness as the bad to mediocre are replaced through price signals by the good and great.

Contrast the above with the popular view inside the money management world itself that the Federal Reserve, by merely fiddling with interest rates, can trick markets into rallies wholly at odds with market realities. What nonsense. What an implied comment that money is stupid, and this is important given Shupe’s routine assertion throughout the book that money is the opposite of stupid.

As the Ayn Rand devotee in Shupe puts it, and in a fashion that would surely please Rand, “Money is an effect that is caused by productive people using persuasion – not force, to achieve their goals.” Yes, money that actually circulates is the surest sign of production, which explains Rand’s reverence for it.

Opposite the simplistic inside and outside of Wall Street, along with the simplistic inside and outside of academia and punditry, money is never “easy” precisely because production is never easy. And no amount of central bank meddling can alter the previous truth.

Very disappointingly, right-of-center types who should know better lament at times “easy money” that is allegedly having all sorts of market and economic impacts, all of which speaks to many important aspects of Shupe’s book. He’s not having it. He’s congenitally predisposed to seeing money as it is, not what the simplistic want it to be.

Which requires readers to forget what central banks and monetary authorities are doing or have done, what they’ve “printed” and what they haven’t, so that they can then concentrate on money in circulation as opposed to money created by central planners from the Commanding Heights. In thinking about this, readers will hopefully see that allowing for its myriad demerits care of powerfully flawed economic theory on the right (Milton Friedman, and countless others) and left (Paul Krugman, and countless others), the dollar facilitates exchange and investment around the world exactly because production itself is money. And the dollar, allowing once again for its demerits born of President Nixon’s decision to sever its relationship with the constant that was and is gold, is seen the world over as money par excellence precisely because the producers who bring goods to market will generally only accept money broadly exchangeable for real market goods, services and labor in return for a commensurate amount of their own market goods.

The above is something that Shupe somewhat uniquely grasps. In his words, “money in circulation will always maintain its ideal level.” Again, forget what central banks, mints, and monetary authorities produce based on the phrenological belief of economists and their disciples that creation of so-called “money supply” instigates production, and instead recognize what’s true, that money in circulation is as natural as the production that money facilitates the exchange of. That’s why there’s a lot of money in Manhattan, but relatively little in the Bronx.

Of course, the truth embraced by Shupe that “money in circulation will always maintain its ideal level” rejects all the fabulism on Wall Street, academia, and within the economic commentariat that aggressive creation of what they imagine is “money” instigates stock-market rallies. What an insult. Call it “you didn’t build that,” Wall Street edition.

More realistically, producers decide what monetary forms circulate based on the not-so-insightful truth that they seek roughly equal amounts of product for the product they bring to market. Applied to equities, the very notion that owners of shares in the production of the world’s most innovative people would blithely exchange what’s precious for just any paper is truly silly.

It’s not just that government meddling runs wholly counter to what lifts equity markets, it’s not just that markets yet again gain their vitality from periods of weakness as money relentlessly puts out to pasture what is no longer meeting and leading the needs of the people, it’s not that the mindless contradiction that is “easy money” has never lifted stocks in Europe and Japan in the way that the confused claim it’s lifted them stateside (again, “you didn’t build that”), it’s that all of what’s been used to explain market conditions completely misunderstands what money is.

Money rewards production, nothing else. It’s where production is, nowhere else. Shupe puts it so well, that “when we understand that money is the stored legacy of productive minds, we earn a healthy respect for it.” Markets respect money, so does Shupe, but not most conventional thinkers who comment on money and markets. Hence Shupe’s book.

From this understanding of money as evidence of production expands understanding for readers more broadly. Consider the myth about so-called “pricing power.” Reporters, pundits, and economists talk about it, believe it’s real, but since money in circulation reflects production while attaching a money price to market goods, the rational can see that it’s not. As Shupe notes, “prices are information and new sellers will continuously enter the marketplace to capture some of that business.”

What’s true about market prices is true about equity prices. The price of well-regarded, some would say “dominant” corporations is the lure for new investment meant to compete away the dominance. Quoting Shupe directly from the previous paragraph, “prices are information and new sellers will continuously enter the marketplace to capture some of that business.”

All of which explains why so-called “monopolies” should be revered and cheered. They’re the price signal that summons competition. Conversely, a lack of so-called “monopoly” profits should similarly be cheered as information for telling investors where more capital is not needed. As Shupe explains it, “breaking even is not productive.” No, it’s not, which is why prices are so elemental to progress.

From the above we can further see the truth about money. The very notion that central banks could “gun” so-called “money supply,” or equally ridiculous, that central banks could contract so-called “money supply,” insults common sense. Production is money, it’s an expression of a desire to get, so to pretend as the right and left do, that economic progress or contraction is an effect of how “easy” or “tight” a central bank is, really and truly vandalizes reason.

It also explains why the dollar circulates all over the world, and in countries that already have their own currencies. It’s quite simply not money unless producers say so. Real money doesn’t instigate, it’s an effect. Rand wore the dollar sign because the dollar then and now facilitates the exchange of goods, services and labor for goods, services and labor.

Equities are a market good like any other. Their prices once again instruct us on what’s needed, what’s not, and what could be. Which is why per Shupe yet again that “money in circulation will always maintain its ideal level.” It quite simply wouldn’t be money if it didn’t.

In an investing-specific sense, Shupe’s client-focused approach is to find out “how much downside market risk can be absorbed without changing the spending goals, saving habits, or the timing events for the investor.” Which seems to ask how much money is the individual willing to lose in the near-term, and in recognition of what near-term losses could mean for the long term.

The question itself would elicit as many answers as there are people, along with wildly different answers from those same people depending on the direction of the stock market. Which seemingly helps this reviewer to provide a simplified approach to Shupe’s more detailed investment technique. Put in Moneyball terms, how to avoid getting outs? On per Munger, how to be “consistently not stupid.”

The seemingly obvious answer is that there’s no way to avoid it altogether. Which is no insight. Just as you can’t coach speed, you also can’t coach a lack of emotional swings. Better to let the markets worry for you, rather than worry about what can’t be controlled. Which means there’s no certain, individual stock-picking style that’s necessarily going to work. That’s particularly true if you have a destination that you’re trying to reach.

To see why, contemplate the blue-chips at the beginning of the 21^st century. Seemingly buying the best of the best corporations to buy and hold would seemingly be the path to a gilded retirement? Perhaps think again. When the 21st century dawned GE was the world’s most valuable company, AOL and Yahoo were the darlings of the internet, Barron’s told us Tyco was the next GE, Enron had the smartest executives (which may have been true despite the outcome), Lucent was the future of communications, etc. Readers get where this is going. So does Shupe.

As first discussed early in this review, Shupe once again tells readers to “replace the stress and errors of predicting the future and beating the market with the resilience of objective data.” Markets once again predict markets. Rather than trying to pick the best of the future best on the way to market-beating returns, just be invested in broad market indices, including those known to perform best when stocks are known to perform the worst. Shupe observes that “index funds are the best fit,” while intermediate term (7-10 years) Treasuries “are the best historical hedge against stock market risk.”

The Treasury hedge in dollar terms would seemingly grow or shrink depending on one’s willingness to take risks. It had me wondering while reading The Moneyball Method how much of Shupe’s own wealth is hedged. This is asked not as a sleuth trying to find holes in Shupe’s investment process, but is instead a question rooted in speculation, all based on Shupe’s reverence for productive minds.

While Treasuries are in a very real sense a riskless income stream since they’re backed by productive minds via taxation, equities represent an ownership stake in the brilliant work of productive minds. Treasuries are yet again an income stream in dollars, while equities represent ownership of the boundless upside that can be captured when productive minds are matched with capital.

It’s a long way of speculating that Shupe is hedged quite a bit less than most for whom he’s managed wealth. And that’s not a criticism. As alluded to earllier, there are as many investing styles as there are people. Still, as someone who recognizes what money is, and who has a healthy respect for money based on this understanding, it’s hard to imagine that Shupe would ever heap even a little disrespect on precious money by exchanging it with the U.S. Treasury in return for the latter’s excessive taxable access to our production.

Mark Shupe has written a very interesting and enlightening book about investing. Of great importance to readers, he doesn’t just provide them with a roadmap for putting wealth to work, he also provides them with a rare understanding of the money that represents the wealth, and that clarifies money as the brilliant effect of the productive minds who relentlessly improve the world through tireless efforts to improve themselves.