Please enjoy my monologue A Zen Money Perspective with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio:
Liberty
Relationship between guilt and gold
You don’t learn if you don’t make mistakes
Psychological attitude toward money
Money is just bookkeeping
National debt
Money as the circulation of information
Changing the psychological attitude toward money
The cost of paying income tax
Psychologically poor
“I wonder often if there is any relationship between guilt and gold.” – Alan Watts
“This has basically never happened before in my whole life. I can remember 1½ percent rates. It certainly surprised all the economists. It surprised the people who created the life insurance industry in Japan, who basically all went broke because they guaranteed to pay a 3% interest rate. I think everybody’s been surprised by it, including all the people who are in the economics profession who kind of pretend they knew it all along. But I think practically everybody was flabbergasted. I was flabbergasted when they went low; when they went negative in Europe – I’m really flabbergasted. How many in this room would have predicted negative interest rates in Europe? Raise your hands. [No hands go up]. That’s exactly the way I feel. How can I be an expert in something I never even thought about that seems so unlikely. It’s new territory…
“I think something so strange and so important is likely to have consequences. I think it’s highly likely that the people who confidently think they know the consequences – none of whom predicted this – now they know what’s going to happen next? Again, the witch doctors. You ask me what’s going to happen? Hell, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I regard it all as very weird. If interest rates go to zero and all the governments in the world print money like crazy and prices go down – of course I’m confused. Anybody who is intelligent who is not confused doesn’t understand the situation very well. If you find it puzzling, your brain is working correctly.”
Shout out to Charles Munger, age 91, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.
In 2013, the Nobel Prize in economics went to three men. One of the recipients, Robert Shiller, is a professor at Yale University known for showing that markets are inefficient. Another was Eugene Fama, a professor at the University of Chicago known for his advocacy of market efficiency. (The third was Lars Hansen, also at the University of Chicago.) This leads to the first point worth stressing: to be an active investor, you must believe in both inefficiency and efficiency. In other words, you have to think that both Shiller and Fama are right―just not at the same time. Naturally, if markets are perfectly efficient there’s no reason to try to beat them through active management. But it’s also true that there’s no reason to try to beat the market through active management if you think markets are always inefficient. That’s because even if you are savvy enough to buy a dollar for fifty cents, there’s no reason to believe that the price and value will ever converge in a perpetually inefficient market.
I wonder how many fundamental analysts could have “predicted” the market’s reaction to the Brexit news. It amazes me how many people still believe these “experts” on TV know what they are talking about. Hopefully some day people will learn that trend following is the only way to prepare for these 100-year floods that seem to happen quite often. Thank you for your podcasts and continuing to educate those who are looking for the right way to trade.
At a philosophical level, it is important to understand that while Brexit is in some respects novel and shocking (no country has ever left the European Union and many polls suggested that Britain would stay), from a broader perspective, Brexit is no different than any of the many exogenous geopolitical events that have periodically disrupted markets over the course of our 37 year investment history. As we see it, Brexit is simply another example of an “unexpected” event happening and investors overreacting to that event in such a way that it causes a great deal of immediate market turmoil.
The financial pain caused by this turmoil is real, it is not enjoyable and it is generally not good for the global financial system or people’s faith in that system, particularly in the short term. However over the long haul, as history has proven over and over again through world wars, revolutions, and numerous other types of global disruptions, markets are resilient and ultimately right themselves to some kind of equilibrium level. Accordingly, our approach to Brexit has been quite similar to the approach we’ve taken to numerous other global shocks and that is to plan, prepare and then “keep calm and carry on” as the British would say.