A View from the Trenches, November 16th, 2009: "On randomness"
Please, click here to read this article in pdf format: www.sibileau.com
Friday’s session was range-bound and nothing fundamentally new has so far taken place. Therefore, I would like to take the opportunity this morning to write about a topic that may be more relevant in 2010.
A reader and friend recently passed me a book titled “The Drunkard’s Walk”, by Leonard Mlodinow. Mr. Mlodinow is a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Univ. of California at Berkeley and he currently teaches probability, statistics, and random processes. I think the merit of the book resides in this: It does not support the view that our lives (and markets) can be modeled according to a random-based approach. Instead, Mr. Mlodinow makes the case that randomness influences our lives more than we can acknowledge and therefore, he gives us insights to distinguish when that is the case, and when it is not. On that account, I thought it would make sense to take a retrospective look at 2008 and 2009, analyze my market views and thesis and discuss, if possible, to what degree randomness would have had an influence on them. Why is this relevant? I feel that 2010 will be more “random” than 2009. Let’s see…
The approach taken at “A View from the Trenches” is that of the Austrian school of Economics. As Toby Baxendale put it: “…The (…) distinguishing mark that separates Austrians from the mainstream economists is the use of the a priori logical analytical method as opposed to the a posteriori, empirical approach (…. If you can reason from self-evident propositions and not contradict the laws of logic as you reason, anything you deduce can only be true…” (T. Baxendale, “The Method of an Austrian Hedge Fund”).
Indeed, since March (this daily letter began to be posted online in April however), I suggested a series of propositions, market theses (for instance, refer: http://sibileau.com/martin/2009/04/21/ “Two main market theses”) that have so far worked well. In short, these were:
1. When the Fed injects liquidity, asset prices rise. When the Fed does not inject liquidity, asset prices fall
2. When there is global coordination of inflationary monetary policies, gold cannot be a safe and lucrative asset. When inflationary monetary policies are not globally coordinated, gold is a safe and lucrative asset
There was no randomness here and I laid out axioms and recommended corresponding tests. One of such tests, for thesis No. 2, was that gold should be a good buy on September 29th (refer http://sibileau.com/martin/2009/09/29/a-tought-on-a-convertible-euro/). Gold had sold off on the news that Robert Mundell had proposed the convertibility of the euro, and in my view, it was self-evident that such proposal was not feasible and that monetary coordination was (and is) falling apart.
Now, when you take the view that randomness dominates economics, because you have an educated view on it or simply because you cannot understand what happens around you, you must trade with stop-losses and stop-profits. When you take the Austrian approach, it is very tempting not to trade that way. I think that is a weakness. In 2009, it was in my favor. I took a consistent long-equity and long-commodity view, never hedged it, and had a great performance. However, in 2008, this approach almost ruined me.
What was random in 2008? The political developments in the US, I think. The “surprises” presented by the financial industry could have been addressed differently. However, in the UK, resources initially went to capitalize institutions, rather than buy assets (i.e. quantitative easing). In the US, the Congress did not approve quantitative easing initially. Furthermore, in the Fall, Secretary of the Treasury Paulson destroyed whatever value was left in Citigroup, when he announced that bailout funds were not going to be used to buy assets, as the law had established, but to capitalize institutions (this changed later, but the damage, had been done).
What was “random” to me in 2009, but which I am sure someone wiser must have foreseen? To me, the random variable was the impressive virtuous cycle triggered by the April-May/09 refinancing wave in the corporate credit market. It was clear to me that liquidity was going to spill over to asset markets (see my letter from April 14th ). However, I never thought that with the maturity swap in debt, the reduction in jump-to-default risk was going to be so supportive of stocks. As well, the almost perfect global monetary coordination carried out in the first half of 2009, was also not in the radar of many.
Coming 2010, the main source of randomness will be the different paths central banks take in developed and emerging markets. Therefore, understanding monetary and political problems from Brazil to Norway and South Korea to Canada will be critical. If we cannot, we will have no alternative but to blindly trade with stop-losses/profits, which is very expensive.
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