I don't know anything about the man or his success record, but as an academic he may not wish to be accused of conflict of interest by promoting companies where he has a personal financial stake.
Academics (pure academics) don't have a good track record predicting valuations/prices, period.
The people who actually have the ability or to predict valuations/prices (better than the market) are busy making millions, if not billions, of dollars, and they most certainly aren't going to tell you about their predictions/models. If they do, it's after they've already invested or shorted the asset.
This isn't quite true and you've pretty much identified the reason why. Academics are not investors and their objective isn't to profit but to publish their research.
Academics identify a pattern that generates superior risk-adjusted returns and then publish their findings - this then leads to the anomaly disappearing as investors trade away the alpha. [0] The track record of an academic can therefore only be meaningfully discussed in terms of how well their model performs in back-testing. Saying they don't have a good track record misses this point.
Perhaps there are successful academic investors who achieve alpha and don't publish their research, however they wouldn't show up in any meta analysis.
I’m not aware of Perelman publishing a “a pattern that generates superior risk-adjusted returns".
That type of information is worth millions, and there are many investment firms offering very lucrative positions to those that can identify a pattern that generates superior risk-adjusted returns.
Outside of very rare outliers, it doesn’t seem reasonable to assume that information that will generate outsized returns will be publicly available.
Because if your chosen career is an academic that's what you do. You research, write and publish. You could probably make more money by selling your ideas in private industry but that's an entire career pivot, it's like a junkyard becoming a cheap used car lot. It's a lot of work and comes with risk. If you're tenured or close to it you should probably just publish. Sure you could try and sell your ideas on the side but that's not going to endear you to other people in academia.
It's possible to express an opinion on the relative value of two stocks while remaining neutral on their correlated returns, by going long one/short the other in the appropriate ratio.
A fair valuation may not be the same as market valuation since you can always bid for a stock high if there's a greater fool to buy it off you. This is what bubbles are made of - and once the music stops valuations will return to the fair valuation derived from multiples of revenue or asset values.
