Lifestyle – Are You a Bond or a Stock?

A Default Lifestyle

Over the last few decades governments have been increasingly moving retirement investing decisions away from companies and onto individuals. Unsurprisingly – at least to anyone who spends any time in the real world – this has led to a lot of poor pensioners and rich fund managers. Slowly, the world has begun to recognise that simply entrusting people with responsibility for managing their own savings is quite a dangerous thing to do: people don’t behave as the models predict. Frankly people don’t even behave as they themselves predict.

In response to this we’re beginning to see the creation of a set of default investing options designed to remove some of the behavioural effects from the process. Amongst these is the idea of the lifestyle fund which defaults investors into a set of investment options that changes as they get older. While this is, in theory, a goodish idea, it doesn’t come close to addressing a fundamental problem which is that people’s wealth is constituted of both their savings and their ability to earn in future. If your job is safe as a bond then investing in shares is probably a good thing, but if it’s not then the default option may be utterly non-optimal.

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Moats, Unbundled

From Wheelwrights to Press Barons

Imagine yourself as a fourteenth century European knight: safely tucked up in our crenulated castle, defended by our deep filled moat, we’re the confident lord and master of all we can see. Yet we’re on the cusp of a technological revolution that will overturn our beliefs and destroy our way of life. Cannon are coming and our moats are about to become prisons, not protection.

Technological advances beget market dislocations, as old business models are overturned and new ones tentatively created. English surnames tell of such changes – Wrights and Smiths now far outnumber wheelwrights and blacksmiths, vocations long in vogue and now irrelevant. Now a new generation of knights stand watching their battlements blown apart as newspaper barons and music moguls desperately try to shore up their crumbling estates. They’re on a hiding to nothing, of course; the invisible hand is unbundling their once impregnable moats through the medium of the internet.

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A Brief History of Behavioural Finance

The Nobel Prize for Psychology

Noble Prize winning committees aren’t renowned for consistency. Giving Barack Obama the Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush is a triumph of hope, but hardly based on rational analysis. We might also wonder if the selection panel got its wires crossed when it awarded the Economics prize to a psychologist.

But it wasn’t just any old shrink who got the bauble. It was Daniel Kahneman, half of the dynamic duo that invented the whole topic of behavioural finance. The other half, Amos Tversky, died in 1996. Between them, Tversky and Kahneman pump primed a change in the way we expect stocks to behave. Outside credit rating agencies, it’s no longer enough to assume we can predict market movements on the basis of number crunching on a grand scale. Now we need to take our own mental confusion into account.

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Satisficing Stockpicking

Logical Lab Rats

When we make decisions we nearly always do so in the context of something or other. In fact about the only time we’re asked to make contextless choices is in academic exams and laboratory based psychology experiments. As these are the two most familiar situations faced by the academics generating the theories that underpin most of modern finance we shouldn’t be awfully surprised if their great ideas are somewhat lacking in any understanding of … well, anything, really.

Being trained to think logically and probabilistically is a necessary part of being a modern economist, but it’s hardly a requirement for most people in most professions most of the time. You don’t find many baristas trying to make Bayesian inferences about which particular coffee to pour next. We clearly don’t rationalise most decisions, we make them quickly and effortlessly. We don’t optimise, we satisfice.

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Weightless Economies

Dangerous Economists

Although economists are generally a fairly harmless group there’s the ever present danger that they’ll get someone or other with some real power to actually listen to their beliefs. Once that happens we’re all potentially in trouble as the subtlety of the real-world gets lost in an economic miasma. A case in point was Selective Employment Tax (SET).

Introduced into the UK in the 1960’s it was a levy so self-evidently stupid even most of Britain’s notoriously supine representatives recognised its imbecility. Yet, backed with the imprimatur of one of the foremost economists of the day, the government went ahead and implemented it anyway in the quaint, old-fashioned belief that money earned through manufacturing is somehow “good” and that through services “bad” – just in time to miss the growth of the knowledge economy. Thus proving that the only thing worse than a politician with an idea is an economist with a Big Idea.

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Behavioral Law and Disorder

Mutual Fund Perfection

It’s may come as a surprise to you that the mutual fund industry, at least in the United States, is a shining record of fiduciary duty. It’s a fact that not once in twenty-five years did a shareholder in one of these funds manage to convince a court that their money has, in any way whatsoever, been mismanaged. This is despite a raft of allegations, originally stemming from the investigations of the ever-vigilant, if nocturnally over-enthusiastic, ex-Attorney General of New York, Elliot Spitzer, that many of the advisors running these funds had deliberately siphoned profits from long-term individual shareholders to institutional clients.

However, a recent judicial decision moves the goalposts – it’s no longer theoretically impossible for a private shareholder to successfully sue a mutual fund. No, now it’s actually impossible. The reason for this is grounded in an economic theory of the marketplace that is dying everywhere else: the idea that markets are perfect. It’s time for a little behavioural law and order.

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Metaphors of Mind and Money

Theories of Mind

The question of how psychologists come up with their theories of how the mind works is one that’s long troubled philosophers. Now this might not seem like a very serious concern, especially to those of us more worried about whether our stocks are going up or down, but this is misleading: how our minds work is part and parcel of how financial systems operate and our theories about this process are important in developing sensible approaches to safe and profitable investment.

Unfortunately psychologists and cognitive scientists who study such things are as likely to suffer from the pain of the availability heuristic as anyone else. The general approach to theory of mind that is now most commonly used is simply based the latest set of tools available to the researchers, who view the mind as a computer. It has ever been thus because we need metaphors to think about things and without metaphors we have nowhere to start from. This brings with it a long legacy of hard to remove but wrong ideas about financial systems.

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An Age of Miracles and Wonders

S-t-r-e-t-c-h

Stretch your arms out to either side and imagine you’re looking at the economic growth of the human race over its entire four thousand year documented history. From the fingertip on your right hand to the first wrinkle on its index ftinger more or less covers the first three thousand eight hundred years. From there to the end of the index finger on your left hand represents growth over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

We truly live in an age of miracles and wonders. Medical advances have ensured more people live longer than ever before, scientific achievements have created a world in which we’re surrounded by astonishing labour saving creations and inventions which allow us to waste the time we’ve saved and the extra years of life we’ve been granted. Meanwhile our economic understanding of how this happened has, well, gone nowhere very interesting really. How did we achieve this state of grace?

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Are IPO’s Bitter Lemons?

In Used Car Dealers We Trust

The Initial Public Offering (IPO) market exposes investors to a classic problem of asymmetric information: there’s not much doubt that the insiders know far more about the true worth of their company than do potential purchasers. So, as outlined by George Akerlof in his classic treatise on the used car market, we would expect that the only companies on offer in this market should be the ones you really don’t want to buy; companies with sticky accelerators and malfunctioning brakes.

Traditionally there’s a way around this impasse, the use of trusted intermediaries whose skill and judgement can be relied on by potential investors to overcome the urge of company owners to maximise their gains and who can distinguish the dross from the jewels. Bizarrely the result of this intervention supposedly sees companies floating at valuations below their real value but, unfortunately, this comes with the ever-present risk of abuse by trustees. Situation abnormal, as usual.

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Behavioural Finance’s Smoking Gun

Linda

Here’s a classic demonstration of behavioural finance in action, proving the irrationality of humankind. It’s the (in)famous Linda problem:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations. Which of these two alternatives is more probable?

(a) Linda is a bank teller.
(b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

Most subjects choose (b) and are informed that they’re irrational because the conjunction of two events – Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement – is less likely than her just being a bank teller, regardless of her leisure interests. This is known as the conjunction fallacy. Unfortunately there’s a teensy little problem with this finding.

It’s wrong and it’s the smoking gun of behavioral finance.

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