Category: Excerpts
I want very,very big profits
Source:MicroCap Club
A better option
Source:Rich Martell
You take what the market gives you
So what’s an investor to do?
I can sum it up in one deceptively simple sentence: You take what the market gives you.
It’s deceptively simple because it implies a totally different perspective on markets than most investors (or allocators, frankly) bring to bear.
It means approaching markets from a position of humility, i.e. risk tolerance, rather than from a position of hubris, i.e. return expectations. It’s all well and good to tell your financial advisor or your board or yourself that you’re “targeting an 8% return.” That’s great. I understand that’s your desire. But the market couldn’t care less what your desire might be.
I think it’s so important to stop focusing on our “expectations” of the market, as if it were some unruly teenager that needs to get its act together and start doing what it’s told.
It’s madness to anthropomorphize the market and believe that we can control it or predict its behavior. Instead, we need to focus on what we CAN control and what we CAN predict, which is our own reaction to what a stochastically-dominated social system like the market is going to throw at us over time.
Tell me what your risk tolerance is. Tell me what path you’re comfortable walking. Then we can talk about the uncorrelated stepping stone strategies that will make up that path to get you where you want to go. Then we can talk about sticking to the path, which far more often means keeping risk in the portfolio than taking it out. Then we can talk about adaptively allocating between the stepping stone strategies as the risk they generate today differs from the risk they generated in the past.
Maybe you’ll get lucky and one of the strategies will crush it, like US equities did in 2013. Excellent! But aren’t we wise enough to distinguish allocation luck from investment skill? I keep asking myself that rhetorical question, but I’m never quite happy with the answer.
–From Salient Partners
I’ll take one trader, one of the most amazing ones, Ed Thorp…He was the guy who changed the way casinos operate. His first fund ran nineteen years, gross returns 19% per year and that’s good, but that’s not the amazing part. The amazing part is nineteen years he had three losing months, all of them were less than one percent. If you had twelve tosses of a coin, nineteen times, you only get three tails, what are the odds of that? And that’s conservative because his wins were larger than his losses, so the odds are smaller. But I did the probability calculation and the odds of his track record being luck are one million times less than the odds of picking a random atom in the entire mass of the earth, and then picking that same atom a second time. In other words, it’s impossible. It’s true that you will get some successful track records by luck, but these ones are beyond luck, that’s impossible if the markets were efficient.”-said Jack Schwager