Kass: The Death of Buy and Hold?

This blog post originally appeared on RealMoney Silver on March 30 at 7:50 a.m. EDT.

If investors have cash on the sidelines, they should not wait too long to put it to use. There are good values out there in equities -- especially in financial stocks -- and you will be rewarded in the long run if you start dollar cost-averaging now.

-- Dr. Jeremy Siegel in an interview with TheStreet.com's Gregg Greenberg in August 2007

With all due respect to Dr. Jeremy Siegel (and though we are both out of Wharton!), I am now firmly in the camp that believes that the buy/hold strategy, which was almost universally accepted by the investment and academic community over the past several decades, is no longer the sole investment strategy to be employed in order to deliver superior investment returns.

A more balanced strategy might now be on the menu.

Glinda, the Good Witch of the North: Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?
Dorothy: I'm not a witch at all. I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas.

-- The Wizard of Oz

In the main, long-term (i.e., buy-and-hold) investors view opportunistic traders/investors as second-class citizens, at best, and as an expletive, at worst. This comes despite some of the most successful hedge-hoggers (e.g., SAC's Stevie Cohen, Michael Steinhardt and George Soros) having made billions of dollars by way of commodity, stock and futures trades.

Recent academic studies, such as Dr. Lubos Pastor (University of Chicago) and Dr. Robert Stambaugh's (Wharton) "Are Stocks Really Less Volatile in the Long Run?" raise questions about the uncertainty of long-term stock market returns and how risky long-term investing might be in the future.

A more violent and uneven corporate profit outlook, higher futures-implied market volatility and the instantaneous dissemination of news are changing the investment landscape and portfolio strategies.

"Lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my!"

-- Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz

Market and economic conditions change, and the keys to prospering and delivering superior investment returns are, as always, based on the ability of a money manager to perceive transformative secular and cyclical developments in companies and industries as well as changes in the broader markets and economy.

More leverage equates to uneven profit growth and greater share price volatility. A more leveraged financial system, by definition, provides an increasingly volatile stream of corporate profits; it seems more likely that an era of higher implied market volatility is here to stay. It holds that change will be more rapid in the future than in the past and that those who adapt to that change most quickly will do better than those whose investment holding period is "forever" -- as Berkshire Hathaway's (BRK.A) Warren Buffett has learned from the flooded moats that he believed would protect the business franchises of depreciated stocks such as American Express (AXP), Wells Fargo (WFC) and U.S. Bancorp (USB).