Deep down, we all know cycles are natural and something to expect when playing the markets. Stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, investment strategies — hell, everything in the cosmos — experiences cycles. Some cycles flow calmly and predictably. Others not so much. More often than not, we get chaos.
Investors love consistency — even at the expense of making less money overall. Returns of 1+1+1+1 (Investment A) is generally more attractive than +3-2-5+10 (Investment B) despite Investment B producing 50% more. The up and down nature of the returns turns people off.
I believe investors have always felt this way, but the post-2008 zero interest rate period intensified this desire for consistent profits. People wanted those regular payments coming in each month. When that disappeared, investors (with the help of fund managers) set out to address this desire.
Attempts to eliminate chaos (the natural order of things) often goes punished. Two popular approaches are 1) strategy tinkering and 2) hopping from one investment to the next in hopes of buying the next near-term winner.
Tinkering. This approach tries to fit the strategy more perfectly to the current or coming market conditions. To pull this off, one needs to know the future on a consistent basis. This approach is doomed before it even starts. However, sometimes people get lucky and think they’ve got the gift. But just when it starts to get easy…well, you know what often happens next.
When people think they know what the markets are doing and why, they load up. They lose the ability to imagine anything else happening, especially the thing(s) that can cause them to lose money. Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) fell into this trap. They thought they figured the markets out. They leveraged way beyond their means and, as a result, went bust. No surprise.
The documentary Trillion Dollar Bet is fantastic look into how LTCM lost sight of sound business and trading principles. And, to be honest, I don’t think they felt like they made any big mistakes, but just that they ran into a spell of bad luck.
Strategy Timing. Switching investments to favor the next, best performing one is next to impossible to do on a consistent enough basis to “beat the market”. Similar to tinkering, nothing is worse than getting it right once or twice. The ego boost one gets from feeling smart generally precedes leveraging up then getting the next one wrong and suffering a catastrophic loss.
I understand the allure of tinkering and timing. What’s better than avoiding the pain while still capturing the gain? What’s better than buying the bottom and selling the top? Making money while feeling smart too? That’s about as good as it gets in the markets. If it happens to you, throw a party and enjoy the short-term luck. Just don’t bet on it becoming the norm.
Chaos is the norm. Medicate it at your own risk.