Friday, September 26, 2008

THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS - By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

And we are beyond suckers: not only, for socio-economic and other nonlinear, complicated variables, are we are riding in a bus driven by a blindfolded driver, but we refuse to acknowledge it in spite of the evidence, which to me is a pathological problem with academia. After 1998, when a "Nobel-crowned" collection of people (and the crème de la crème of the financial economics establishment) blew up Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund, because the "scientific" methods they used misestimated the role of the rare event, such methodologies and such claims on understanding risks of rare events should have been discredited. Yet the Fed helped their bailout and exposure to rare events (and model error) patently increased exponentially (as we can see from banks' swelling portfolios of derivatives that we do not understand).
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Related article: Shattering the Bell Curve
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Related books:
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Thursday, September 25, 2008

BFBV Newsletter (No. 2) - Professor Sanjay Bakshi

Legendary Investor Richard Feynman

As far as I know, Richard Feynman never bought a stock in his life. If he did, he never talked about it or about his “investment acumen.” But he should have...

Feynman was not only a great physicist, he was also a great teacher.

Does it not bother you that one of the greatest men of science that the world has seen is quite happy to accept uncertainty (“I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about.”), while you are studying how to use the DCF model to value businesses? That’s a model which requires you to predict cash flows more than thirty years out requiring “degrees of certainty” that Feynman would have laughed at.

Does it not bother you that a man of science can dare to say “I don’t know” while investment analysts almost never say that?

Feynman once said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

How true! How we analysts fool ourselves so often! How often we just believe what we are told by companies and their self-interested agents and convert that nonsense into very nice-looking reports with plenty of pie charts and tables which make the whole thing look so believable!

In one of his famous lectures, Feynman was talking about the scientific method of inquiry. He said, “Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true.”
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The quote just above relates to cognitive dissonance. In the previous post, I listed Professor Bakshi’s advice from one of his lectures: "Learn to promptly resolve cognitive dissonance and you will acquire one of the greatest mental habits."

The Wikipedia definition:
“In psychology, cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling or stress caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a fundamental cognitive drive to reduce this dissonance by modifying an existing belief, or rejecting one of the contradictory ideas.
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Often one of the ideas is a fundamental element of ego, like "I am a good person" or "I made the right decision." This can result in rationalization when a person is presented with evidence of a bad choice, or in other cases. Prevention of cognitive dissonance may also contribute to confirmation bias or denial of discomforting evidence.”
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For a discussion on negotiating cognitive dissonance, see: Cognitive Dissonance
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Related previous post: The Pleasure of finding Things out
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Books:
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Monday, September 22, 2008

Josh Waitzkin @ Google

I was a little slow getting around to watching this, but it was worth the wait. Josh Waitzkin also shared an interesting definition of wisdom from Robert Thurman: "Wisdom is the tolerance of cognitive dissonance." Related to that quote is some advice from Professor Sanjay Bakshi's 5th Lecture: "Learn to promptly resolve cognitive dissonance and you will acquire one of the greatest mental habits."
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Authors@Google
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Related books:
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The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance
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Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
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The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
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BFBV Newsletter - Professor Sanjay Bakshi

If you want to improve your persuasive skills you have to learn how to exploit other people’s availability bias. You already know that people overweigh information which is extra-vivid, recent, and experienced personally than vicariously.

First impressions count. So do last impressions. So when you make a pitch to anyone, frame it in such a way that people to whom you are pitching remember your first lines and your last lines. Often the lines in the middle don’t really matter. What people remember is how they perceived you when they first met you and when they last met you.

Frame your requests as vividly as you can. Frame them around something personal to the requestee. And frame them around something that happened recently and which is in the forefront of the requestee’s mind.
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Imagine that you have a request that you want to make to your boss. You have an idea which will, in your view, immensely benefit your company. Now there are two ways in which you can present this information to your boss. First, you can tell her how your company stands to gain if your proposal is implemented. The second way is to reverse it by framing the request in loss terms. This time, you tell your boss how your company stands to lose if it did not implement your lovely proposal.

Framing it in loss terms will significantly improve your chances of succeeding in your efforts to convince your boss, unless there are other forces at work.

That bit about “other forces at work” is somewhat important because I don’t want 113 of you in my class to approach your favorite potential employers at placement time with suggestions on how they stand to lose by not hiring you! If 113 of you frame it that way, well then there might be some very undesirable unintended consequences of your behavior!

Let me move on to contrast effect. What has that to do with framing and its influence on your persuasion skills? Lots. When you frame your request using the technique of reciprocal concessions described so well by Robert Cialdini in his book, and discussed in the class, you increase your chances of compliance. Ask for the moon, expecting to be refused and then ask for what you wanted to get in the first place.

Another example in framing is to do with what Mr. Munger calls “reason respecting tendency.”

People like reasons when they are asked to comply with a request. I call this the “power of because.”

The lesson is obvious for you future framers. Always give a reason for your request because it will increase its probability of compliance. When you have a good reason then provide it. When you don’t, then just invent one!”
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Related Books:
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Thursday, September 18, 2008

My Investment Philosophy

Update: My philosophy has evolved since this post was first written. One day, I may include my investing checklist on this page, but it is still evolving as well. Until then, these 2 quotes best summarize the process I try to follow.

“If only one word is to be used to describe what Baupost does, that word should be: 'Mispricing'. We look for mispricing due to over-reaction.” -Seth Klarman

In my opinion, there are two key concepts that investors must master: value and cycles. For each asset you’re considering, you must have a strongly held view of its intrinsic value. When its price is below that value, it’s generally a buy. When its price is higher, it’s a sell. In a nutshell, that’s value investing.

But values aren’t fixed; they move in response to changes in the economic environment. Thus, cyclical considerations influence an asset’s current value. Value depends on earnings, for example, and earnings are shaped by the economic cycle and the price being charged for liquidity.

Further, security prices are greatly affected by investor behavior; thus we can be aided in investing safely by understanding where we stand in terms of the market cycle. What’s going on in terms of investor psychology, and how does it tell us to act in the short run? We want to buy when prices seem attractive. But if investors are giddy and optimism is rampant, we have to consider whether a better buying opportunity mightn’t come along later.” –Howard Marks

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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Buffett Warned Us in 2003, Few Listened - by Todd N Kenyon

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Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Professor Sanjay Bakshi's Lectures

Professor Sanjay Bakshi has posted some of his lectures on his blog, Fundoo Professor:
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Lecture 01
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Lecture 02
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Lecture 03
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Monday, September 15, 2008

The Perils of the “Mindless Imitation of One’s Peers”

Mr. Buffett made some comments when speaking to a group from Notre Dame in 1991 that are relevant to what's going on today:
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The last thing I want to show you, before we get onto your questions, is an ad that was run June 16, 1969, for 1,000,000 shares of American Motors. This is a reproduction from the Wall Street Journal of that day. Now does anybody notice anything unusual about that ad?

[Guesses from audience.]

Everybody in that ad has disappeared. There are 37 investment bankers that sold that issue, plus American Motors, and they are all gone. Maybe that’s why they call them tombstone ads. Now the average business of the New York Stock exchange in 1969 was 11 million shares. Average volume now is fifteen times as large. Now here’s an industry whose volume has grown 15 to 1 in 20 years. Marvelous growth in the financial world. And here are 37 out of 37, and those are some of the biggest names on Wall Street, and some of them had been around the longest, and 37 out of 37 have disappeared. And that’s why I say you ought to think about [the long-term durability of a business?] because these people obviously didn’t.

These were run by people with high IQs, by people that worked ungodly hard. They were people that had an intense interest in success. They worked long hours. They all thought they were going to be leaders on Wall Street at some point, and they all went around, incidentally, giving advice to other companies about how to run their business. That’s sort of interesting.

You go to Wall Street today, and there’s some company the guy hadn’t heard of two weeks before and he’s trying to sell you. He will lay out this computer run of the next 10 years, yet he doesn’t have the faintest idea of what his own business is going to earn next week!

Here are a group of 37. And the question is, how can you get a result like that? That is not a result that you get by chance. How can people who are bright, who work hard, who have their own money in the business – these are not a bunch of absentee owners – how can they get such a bad result? And I suggest that’s a good thing to think about before you get a job and go out into the world.

I would say that if you had to pick one thing that did it more than anything else, it’s the mindless imitation of one’s peers that produced this result. Whatever the other guy did, the other 36 were like a bunch of lemmings in terms of following. That’s what’s gotten all the big banks in trouble for the past 15 years. Every time somebody big does something dumb, other people can hardly wait to copy it. If you do nothing else when you get out of here, do things only when they make sense to you. You ought to be able to write “I am going to work for General Motors because ... “I am buying 100 shares of Coca Coals stock because...” And if you can’t write an intelligent answer to those questions, don’t do it.
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Wintergreen Fund: Semi-Annual Report

The market has not discriminated between high-quality and low-quality companies; virtually every stock has declined. Generally, markets reward solid, stable companies, but this year even the best companies have suffered. The movement from easy credit to little or no available credit has restricted normal business operations and slowed down speculation. We believe companies with the following three characteristics are great long-term destinations for investor capital, even though the short-term quotations are less than favorable: solid businesses that generate cash; businesses with pricing power; and businesses with rational management who create value for their shareholders.

A favorite story of mine as a child was “The Little Engine That Could” by Watty Piper. In this story, a long train needed help to get over a large mountain. Various railroad engines that had the capacity to move the train refused to help. They said the job was too big and difficult for them, and the mountain was too steep. The engines that were designed to haul heavy freight would not attempt to move the huge train. Eventually a small engine that didn’t appear to have the necessary get-up-and-go was asked for assistance and that small engine agreed to try to help the large train. Using all of its power and repeating ‘I think I can, I think I can’, the small engine got the freight train up to the top of the mountain. As the train went down the tracks on the far side of the mountain to deliver toys and treats to the children who had been waiting, the little engine repeated the phrase, ‘I thought I could, I thought I could’.

In this global market that looks too big for anyone or anything to bring it back to a more stable environment, I think that solid analysis of companies and careful accumulation of underpriced stocks has the potential to yield great rewards. Like the little engine that put its head down and worked at its assignment, the pursuit of fundamental research coupled with an appreciation of the consistency of human behavior should identify the securities that I believe will survive and thrive in the future. Now is the time when some of these companies are on sale. Although no one knows precisely when, it is inevitable that these wild bargain prices will at some point in time come to a close. When that happens, and with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, many investors will wish they had accumulated a bigger stake in these bargain companies.
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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

The Art of Short Selling

A friend (thanks Andrew) recommended an excellent book about short selling and fundamental analysis called The Art of Short Selling by Kathryn Staley. I also recommend the book and a video of a talk she gave at the Notre Dame Center for Accounting Research and Education:
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Book ----- Video
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Monday, September 8, 2008

Smart Taxes: An Open Invitation to Join the Pigou Club – By N. Gregory Mankiw

As an economics educator, I have always been fascinated by topics about which there is a large gap between the beliefs of economists and those of the general public. For example, economists are generally supportive of free trade among nations, while the public is more skeptical. Economists oppose rent control, while much of the public supports the policy.

In these and other cases where economists and mere muggles don’t see eye-to-eye, you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that I am quick to side with my fellow economists. I like to think that this reaction is more than mere professional solidarity but is, instead, a symptom of my commitment to rational thought. Unlike most people, who spend their time thinking about their children, local sports team, or favorite sitcom, economists have devoted much of their lives to thinking about such things as international trade and rent control. That fact may make us boring at cocktail parties, but it does have some offsetting benefits. It is not a stretch to believe that more thought about an issue leads to more reliable conclusions. As a result, I feel comfortable with conclusion that, regarding these issues, economists are right and the general public is just ill informed.

My topic for today is a policy about which there is a particularly large gap between economists and the public: Pigovian taxation. In particular, I want to talk about taxes on energy-related products, such as gasoline taxes. Not long ago, the economist Steve Levitt, coauthor of the best-seller Freakonomics, wrote on his blog, “For a long time I have felt the price of gasoline in the United States was way too low. Pretty much all economists believe this.” Levitt then went on to argue for higher taxes on gasoline. At about the same time, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had precisely the opposite perspective. She announced “a series of hearings to address rising gas prices—focusing on the causes, the burdens they put on American families and businesses, and solutions.”
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Related site: Greg Mankiw's Blog
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CERN fires up new atom smasher to near Big Bang

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YouTube video mentioned in article: Large Hadron Rap
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Follow-up (9/10/2008) after initial start: Into the wild blue yonder
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Related previous post: Known and unknown unknowns
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Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Buffett's Best Man

IN CONTRAST TO THE showman-like Buffett, Munger shuns the spotlight. But he draws a smaller, more fanatical cult that seeks inspiration from his intellectual omnivorousness. "There are few people who consider acquiring knowledge their life's study -- he's an exemplar," says Chris Davis, of the $65 billion Davis Funds. "Buffett will understand something on a micro level," adds hedge fund star Mohnish Pabrai, "but Munger will understand how it fits into the world looking a decade out." Pabrai suggests that if you gave an IQ test to their respective fan clubs, Munger's would beat Buffett's "by quite a few points." Whoever would win, with the market choppy and both partners getting up in years, investing acolytes were eager to catch Munger on one of his rare public appearances -- and we were glad to catch him for an even rarer interview.
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When picking winners out of the herd, of course, it helps to have Buffett- or Munger-caliber acumen. Munger insists that involves little more than common sense -- the kind that comes from educating yourself broadly across multiple disciplines. Unlike other investors, Munger says, he and Buffett are careful not to overestimate what they know: "It's a disaster if you don't know the edge of your competency." They work hard at avoiding investing "asininities" and "possess a vast ability to dis-learn" when their assumptions prove false. And they keep enough cash on hand to act quickly -- since good investments don't swim by that often, Munger explains, "you have to be the man standing by a river with a spear." How to recognize those opportunities? That's where omnivorousness comes in. "Learn your gaps, and fill them," he says. "If you get three textbooks on a subject and skim them, it's a good start. That's what I do."
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To view Mr. Munger's Caltech appearance, see this post: Video: A Conversation with Charlie Munger
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The best way to learn more about Mr. Munger and the 'Latticework of Mental Models Approach' to life and learning: Poor Charlie's Almanack
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