How would you describe someone who’s made a fortune in the stock market, only to lose it all, many times over? The average journalist would probably choose from among dogged, persistent, undaunted, and maybe irrepressible. According to Professor Rizzo, they should probably just use ‘lucky’.
What is this chart telling us? It is a reminder that current market prices tend to capture any relevant and publicly relevant information about a product, company, sector, or industry. This is the simple foundation for the “Efficient Markets Hypothesis.” What are its implications? Well, it would suggest that an investor, by looking at business cycle conditions, and other publicly available information, cannot profit from that information by trading based on it.
Does that mean investors cannot beat the market? Not at all. But do not confuse luck with competence.
This reminds me of an old Gladwell piece, available here and in his book, that looks at two different Wall Street strategies, and the rise of Nassim Taleb’s no-risk, slow-reward approach.
One day in 1996, a Wall Street trader named Nassim Nicholas Taleb went to see Victor Niederhoffer. Victor Niederhoffer was one of the most successful money managers in the country. He lived and worked out of a thirteen-acre compound in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and when Taleb drove up that day from his home in Larchmont he had to give his name at the gate, and then make his way down a long, curving driveway. Niederhoffer had a squash court and a tennis court and a swimming pool and a colossal, faux-alpine mansion in which virtually every square inch of space was covered with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American folk art. In those days, he played tennis regularly with the billionaire financier George Soros. He had just written a best-selling book, “The Education of a Speculator,” dedicated to his father, Artie Niederhoffer, a police officer from Coney Island. He had a huge and eclectic library and a seemingly insatiable desire for knowledge. When Niederhoffer went to Harvard as an undergraduate, he showed up for the very first squash practice and announced that he would someday be the best in that sport; and, sure enough, he soon beat the legendary Shariff Khan to win the U.S. Open squash championship. That was the kind of man Niederhoffer was. He had heard of Taleb’s growing reputation in the esoteric field of options trading, and summoned him to Connecticut. Taleb was in awe.
“He didn’t talk much, so I observed him,” Taleb recalls. “I spent seven hours watching him trade. Everyone else in his office was in his twenties, and he was in his fifties, and he had the most energy of them all. Then, after the markets closed, he went out to hit a thousand backhands on the tennis court.” Taleb is Greek-Orthodox Lebanese and his first language was French, and in his pronunciation the name Niederhoffer comes out as the slightly more exotic Nieder hoffer. “Here was a guy living in a mansion with thousands of books, and that was my dream as a child,” Taleb went on. “He was part chevalier, part scholar. My respect for him was intense.” There was just one problem, however, and it is the key to understanding the strange path that Nassim Taleb has chosen, and the position he now holds as Wall Street’s principal dissident. Despite his envy and admiration, he did not want to be Victor Niederhoffer — not then, not now, and not even for a moment in between. For when he looked around him, at the books and the tennis court and the folk art on the walls — when he contemplated the countless millions that Niederhoffer had made over the years — he could not escape the thought that it might all have been the result of sheer, dumb luck.
It’s an excellent piece, and good reading for any of us who deal in the ideas of business, or the business of ideas.
Check out the Black Swan. Taleb is a genius