Delving into sayings on volatility and risk, the podcast shares historical market events and the deceptive nature of prices. Reflecting on Mark Twain's wisdom and exploring risks in portfolios, it delivers insights with a touch of humor and pop culture references.
The history of risk is like a foreign country, challenging to interpret accurately based on past events and implications.
Back testing shows there is always a winner, cautioning about potential misinterpretations and unreliable results.
Deep dives
The Significance of History in Understanding Risk
Reflecting on iconic songs and events from the past, the podcast emphasizes that the history of risk is like a foreign country, with events and their implications being sometimes hard to appreciate. It discusses how memory and history intertwine, highlighting the challenges of accurately remembering past events, especially in the context of market risks and historical market movements like the Bond market massacre in 1994.
The Cautionary Tale of Back Testing
The podcast delves into the concept of back testing, cautioning about the interpretation of back tested results and their implications, emphasizing that every back test has a winner based on predefined criteria. It explores scenarios where back tests can present misleading outcomes, providing examples of how different factors, such as market conditions and assumptions, can impact the reliability of back tested data.
Price, Volatility, and Truth in Market Dynamics
Discussing price discrepancies and volatility in markets, the podcast presents price as a deceptive element that may not always align with economic realities, pointing out instances where prices can mislead market participants. It further explores volatility as an instrument of truth, highlighting how market turbulence and dislocations can reveal underlying truths in asset prices and investor behaviors, using examples like the EuroSwiss peg and the impact of volatility on market dynamics.
Our journey to 25 Sayings on Vol and Risk continues, folks…and as UFC’s Bruce Buffer is known to emphatically tells us…”It’s TIME!”… for our third segment…sayings 11-15. We’ve got some good ones ahead of us and, as always, I aim to share some of my thinking on markets, overlay a dose of history and pop culture and, perhaps, give you a chuckle in the process. We’ll be in and out in under 30 minutes, i.e., shorter than a Powell presser, a five-block cab ride from the east side to west side, and no doubt less time it takes Windows to update the drivers on your PC.
Sayings 11 through 15 are…
1. “If history is a foreign country, the history of risk is another planet.”
2. “By definition, there’s a winner to every back-test.”
3. “Price is a liar.”
4. “Volatility is an instrument of truth.”
5. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
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