Tape 161 - Challenge to investment judgment
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| Host | Welcome once again as MIT professor Paul Samuelson | 0:01 |
| discusses the current economic scene. | 0:04 | |
| This series is produced by Instructional Dynamics | 0:06 | |
| Incorporated. | 0:09 | |
| This program was recorded August 27. | 0:10 | |
| Paul Samuelson | I'd like today to talk about a problem | 0:14 |
| of long run importance. | 0:17 | |
| I'm constantly being asked, what is this notion that the | 0:19 | |
| stock market accomplishes something? | 0:25 | |
| Isn't it manifestly a case of hysteria and enthusiasm | 0:28 | |
| at the moment that I'm speaking in August of 1974? | 0:35 | |
| The Dow Jones Industrial averages of 30 stocks, stocks | 0:42 | |
| that people look at, have at least momentarily broken down | 0:48 | |
| through 700, below 700. | 0:54 | |
| They were 1,050. | 0:56 | |
| Adjusted two or three years back, the American economy | 0:58 | |
| hasn't changed very much, but the quotations on those stocks | 1:02 | |
| have certainly changed. | 1:05 | |
| Indeed, they're right now as low as they were back at | 1:08 | |
| the depths of the 1970 recession. | 1:14 | |
| And you could go back to the middle 1960s to find | 1:17 | |
| the Dow Jones as low as this. | 1:25 | |
| They're broad categories of stocks, public utility stocks, | 1:28 | |
| for example, which are right now where they were 13 or 15 | 1:31 | |
| years ago. | 1:35 | |
| Now, that being the case how can a economist seriously argue | 1:38 | |
| that the something like the random walk hypothesis holds | 1:43 | |
| for the stock market? | 1:49 | |
| How can he argue that all of the best information is | 1:52 | |
| constantly being processed by the best intelligence | 1:56 | |
| and is constantly being turned into some of kind of correct | 2:02 | |
| pricing? | 2:06 | |
| That's the question that I'm asked repeatedly, and I'd like | 2:08 | |
| therefore to discuss this fundamental problem to you. | 2:13 | |
| It's not only a fundamental problem in personal finance, | 2:18 | |
| but it's a problem of great moment for how we run | 2:21 | |
| the economic system. | 2:25 | |
| Because if the stock market is just a casino, that doesn't | 2:26 | |
| accomplish very much, then if we wiped it out under some | 2:29 | |
| puritanical laws, there wouldn't be much harm done. | 2:35 | |
| On the other hand, if it really is accomplishing a lot, | 2:39 | |
| it would be a tragedy to let temporary populist bouts | 2:42 | |
| of opposition to such an institution lead to the euthanasia | 2:49 | |
| of it. | 2:55 | |
| For this purpose, I was asked to prepare an article for | 2:57 | |
| a new journal. | 3:05 | |
| This is the new journal called the Journal of Portfolio | 3:07 | |
| Decision Making. | 3:11 | |
| It's to bridge the gap between the academic world | 3:13 | |
| of finance, the sort of thing that assistant and associate | 3:18 | |
| professors of finance in the graduate business schools | 3:21 | |
| of this country write about and study. | 3:25 | |
| And, the actual practical world where institutional money | 3:29 | |
| managers are putting their reputations on the line each day | 3:35 | |
| in trying to perform a little bit better than a random dog | 3:41 | |
| could do, and a little bit better than the best of their | 3:51 | |
| colleagues could do. | 3:56 | |
| Let me say in the beginning, that this particular magazine | 4:00 | |
| or journal is, as I understand it, being published by | 4:05 | |
| the same publishers who published the Institutional | 4:10 | |
| Investor, which has been a very successful magazine | 4:13 | |
| for people in the money market. | 4:18 | |
| The Institutional Investor group have sponsored innumerable | 4:20 | |
| conferences in New York, and those conferences, I imagine | 4:27 | |
| don't come cheap, and they're attended by really thousands | 4:33 | |
| of people. | 4:38 | |
| No doubt there's an ebb and flow. | 4:39 | |
| It's no secret that there are a lot of holes in people's | 4:42 | |
| shoes in Wall Street today, so instead of each company | 4:45 | |
| taking 20 tickets to a conference like this they might | 4:50 | |
| economize and send just three people there, so the | 4:56 | |
| attendances are down, but perhaps the loss to the commercial | 4:59 | |
| world is a gain to scholarship and so this may help | 5:05 | |
| to explain why this new journal is being started. | 5:10 | |
| It's new editor, I think they're lucky in their choice | 5:13 | |
| of him, it's Peter Bernstein, Peter Bernstein is a | 5:17 | |
| well-known economist who happens also to be a well-known | 5:20 | |
| investment counselor. | 5:25 | |
| He was a graduate of Harvard College and taught at Williams | 5:27 | |
| College and then was an economist for New York Bank, | 5:33 | |
| I think the amalgam made it Workers' Bank, and then | 5:36 | |
| he went into his father's firm, rather famous firm | 5:41 | |
| of Bernstein McColley. | 5:45 | |
| Fred McColley was a very emminent researcher at the National | 5:48 | |
| Bureau, did some of the first work on the relationship | 5:52 | |
| between term structures of interest rate. | 5:55 | |
| And that prospered and finally became part of Hayden Stone | 6:02 | |
| and more recently, I believe that organization continues | 6:06 | |
| with Hayden Stone but Peter Bernstein has gone back | 6:10 | |
| on his own and I think he's doing some consulting for | 6:13 | |
| a large foundations. | 6:17 | |
| So, you have a man who has a foot in both worlds. | 6:20 | |
| The new issue will be available to subscribers, I don't | 6:25 | |
| think you can see it on your friendly news stand unless | 6:29 | |
| you have an unusually academic news stand. | 6:33 | |
| Sometime I suppose this fall because I know that the first | 6:38 | |
| edition is now in the press. | 6:44 | |
| Well, when invited to contribute to the first issue, | 6:47 | |
| I thought I would and I thought I'd really throw | 6:50 | |
| the gauntlet down to the practical man. | 6:53 | |
| So, let me share with you the rather brief views that I | 6:55 | |
| stated in this original article. | 7:03 | |
| No mathematical equations in the article. | 7:05 | |
| I suppose that's uncharacteristic of an academic economist | 7:09 | |
| and it's written in a casual style, but it's meant | 7:12 | |
| seriously. | 7:17 | |
| The title that I gave is Challenge To Judgment. | 7:18 | |
| That is a challenge to the notion that discretionary | 7:22 | |
| security analysis and portfolio decision making does | 7:26 | |
| accomplish something. | 7:30 | |
| I begin by pointing out that there, there are now two | 7:33 | |
| worlds. | 7:36 | |
| Once upon a time, there was one world of investments. | 7:37 | |
| It was the world of practical operators in the stock | 7:40 | |
| markets and the bond markets. | 7:43 | |
| But now there are two worlds. | 7:45 | |
| There's the same old practical world, of course, a little | 7:46 | |
| bit the worse for wear, and the new world of the academics | 7:48 | |
| with their mathematical stochastic processes. | 7:52 | |
| Stochastic process means they probabilistic analysis. | 7:56 | |
| These worlds it's fair to say are still light years apart. | 8:01 | |
| They're as far apart as the distance from New York | 8:06 | |
| to Cambridge or New York to Berkeley, or perhaps | 8:09 | |
| exaggerating a bit, they're as far apart as the vast width | 8:13 | |
| of the Charles River between the Harvard Business School | 8:17 | |
| and the Harvard Yard where the academic statisticians tend | 8:20 | |
| to reside. | 8:25 | |
| Now perhaps there has been in recent years some discernible | 8:27 | |
| rate of convergence between this disparate worlds but | 8:30 | |
| in any case I guess I would expect the future to show | 8:34 | |
| some further approach between them. | 8:37 | |
| But let me reveal my own bias. | 8:40 | |
| I think the ball is in the court of the practical men. | 8:44 | |
| It is the turn of the mountain to take the first step | 8:47 | |
| towards the theoretical Mohammed. | 8:50 | |
| In other words, the convergence I think is going to have | 8:52 | |
| to take place between the practical men, coming closer | 8:55 | |
| to the academics than to have the academics get closer | 8:58 | |
| to the practical men. | 9:02 | |
| Now that shows how academic I am. | 9:03 | |
| Well let me explain. | 9:08 | |
| If you oversimplify the debate, it can be put in the form | 9:10 | |
| of the following simple question | 9:14 | |
| Resolved that the best of money managers cannot | 9:16 | |
| be demonstrated to be able to deliver the goods of superior | 9:21 | |
| portfolio selection performance. | 9:24 | |
| Any jury that reviews the evidence, and I think there is | 9:29 | |
| a great deal of relevant evidence, must at least come out | 9:32 | |
| with the Scottish verdict, superior investment performance | 9:37 | |
| is unproved. | 9:41 | |
| In our system of jurisprudence, the jury finds you guilty | 9:43 | |
| or unguilty, or not guilty, innocent. | 9:46 | |
| But in the Scottish system it used to be the case at least | 9:49 | |
| that there was an intermediate category called unproved. | 9:54 | |
| Well I think that superior investment performance is to | 9:58 | |
| say the least unproved. | 10:01 | |
| Now let me clarify. | 10:04 | |
| I don't want to be misunderstood. | 10:06 | |
| It's true, the Morgan Guarantee Bank trust department | 10:08 | |
| did do better in certain years than the average mutual fund. | 10:12 | |
| That's demonstrable fact. | 10:16 | |
| It's not in doubt. | 10:19 | |
| It isn't denied either that, say, the T. Rowe Price | 10:21 | |
| organization achieved greater increments of wealth in many | 10:25 | |
| years than did many other organizations. | 10:30 | |
| And both of these may well turn out to perform better than | 10:34 | |
| the market as a whole in the future. | 10:37 | |
| Yet, remember this. | 10:41 | |
| There were years when the Dreyfus Fund or the Enterprise | 10:43 | |
| Fund or the Fidelity Funds or, dare I say it, Chang, | 10:46 | |
| Chang's portfolios, they seem greatly to outperform | 10:53 | |
| the mob. | 10:59 | |
| And then again, there were other years when they didn't. | 11:00 | |
| And the same thing is true about the Morgan Guarantee Trust | 11:02 | |
| portfolio. | 11:07 | |
| It's no secret that the last year or so has not been great | 11:08 | |
| for the first tier of the market where the Morgan people | 11:12 | |
| have primarily been. | 11:17 | |
| They can tell you how they've done on Avon and Polaroid | 11:17 | |
| and perhaps Xerox and IBM and the story is not the great | 11:22 | |
| triumphant story that it used to be. | 11:29 | |
| Similarly, with respect to T. Rowe Price, they still, | 11:32 | |
| it still is an estimable organization, but the confidence | 11:37 | |
| in which an observer can say that that organization has | 11:43 | |
| recently been outperforming the rest or the averages must | 11:49 | |
| very much be diminished. | 11:55 | |
| What at issue, what's at issue, is not whether as a matter | 11:59 | |
| of logic or root fact, that could exist at subset of | 12:04 | |
| decision makers in the markets who are capable of doing | 12:10 | |
| better than the averages on a repeatable sustainable basis. | 12:13 | |
| There's no reason and logic why there shouldn't be a small | 12:18 | |
| group of, I won't even call them insiders because that | 12:20 | |
| sounds as if they get their extra edge by means of inside | 12:23 | |
| information, but there could be a small group of people | 12:31 | |
| who are capable of doing better than the averages, then | 12:33 | |
| the totals on a repeatable sustainable basis. | 12:37 | |
| There's nothing in the mathematics of random walks | 12:41 | |
| or Brownian movements, which academic economists apply | 12:44 | |
| to the stock market, that A, proves this to be impossible, | 12:48 | |
| or B, postulates that it is in fact impossible. | 12:52 | |
| In other words, as a matter of logic or a matter of fact. | 12:59 | |
| The crucial point though is this. | 13:03 | |
| When investigators, and there are a lot of them, a lot | 13:06 | |
| of good ones, like Irwin Friend of the Wharton School | 13:08 | |
| at the University of Pennsylvania or Jack Trainor, now | 13:13 | |
| the editor of the Securities Analyst Journal, or James | 13:17 | |
| Laurie at the graduate business school, or Fisher Black | 13:20 | |
| and Myron Scholes of the graduate Chicago Business School. | 13:24 | |
| Or, it doesn't have to be an academic, any foundation | 13:30 | |
| treasurer of fair-minded and serious intent. | 13:33 | |
| If they look to identify those minority groups or methods, | 13:39 | |
| and endowed with sustainable superior prowess, they seem | 13:43 | |
| quite unable to find them. | 13:48 | |
| The only honest conclusion then, I think, is to agree, | 13:52 | |
| that a loose version of the "efficient market" or random | 13:57 | |
| walk unquote hypothesis does accord with the facts | 14:03 | |
| of life. | 14:08 | |
| Now, this truth, let me emphasize, is a truth about New | 14:10 | |
| York. | 14:14 | |
| It's also a truth about Chicago and it's a truth about | 14:16 | |
| Omaha. | 14:18 | |
| And it's as true in New York as it is in Cambridge. | 14:19 | |
| If it's true, it's true about the real world, it's not | 14:25 | |
| something which is true in the learned papers in the | 14:27 | |
| assistant professors of finance or in the PhD theses | 14:33 | |
| of graduate students of the business schools. | 14:36 | |
| It's either true or it's not true. | 14:38 | |
| This doesn't say that many people, even most people, aren't | 14:43 | |
| capable of frittering away the funds given them. | 14:48 | |
| Most people can be capable of doing worse than the averages | 14:52 | |
| or worse than at random. | 14:59 | |
| To lose money all you have to do is flip a coin. | 15:02 | |
| Buy General Motors on heads and sell it on tails and just | 15:05 | |
| keep doing that. | 15:09 | |
| That way you'll do worse than the averages. | 15:11 | |
| And you'll do worse even in holding General Motors | 15:14 | |
| or avoiding it. | 15:17 | |
| The money you lose and on that system the odds are | 15:20 | |
| overwhelmingly against you. | 15:23 | |
| That money will go to lower the losses of your hard-pressed | 15:26 | |
| broker. | 15:28 | |
| It's not true that it's a zero sum game. | 15:30 | |
| That what you lose some other speculator wins because | 15:33 | |
| there's a lot of dead weight loss due to just the dead | 15:36 | |
| weight of commissions. | 15:42 | |
| Similarly, the transaction volume generated by the | 15:45 | |
| non-random decisions of the vast majority of the big | 15:48 | |
| and small investors who all think they have a flair, | 15:51 | |
| but don't demonstrably have it. | 15:56 | |
| Most of those transactions serve only to suck economic | 16:00 | |
| resources out of useful GNP activities, you name it, | 16:03 | |
| (mumbles) and you, whatever you think is useful in the GNP. | 16:09 | |
| And puts those resources into brokers, telephone | 16:12 | |
| solicitations and into a lot of bookkeeping. | 16:16 | |
| Now, this is not a condemnation of market activity. | 16:20 | |
| Even if 8 out of ten transactions are wasteful, who's | 16:24 | |
| to say which are the two that are not. | 16:27 | |
| I went to a retirement dinner for Professor Larry Seltzer | 16:30 | |
| of Wayne State University, a very eminent economist who | 16:37 | |
| had been there 50 years if you can believe it, and in his | 16:39 | |
| nice little speech he quoted one of his professors and said, | 16:47 | |
| "All my life what I've been teaching has been half wrong | 16:51 | |
| and unfortunately I don't know which half it is." | 16:54 | |
| Well, so it can be argued that some transactions are | 16:56 | |
| desirable and necessary. | 17:02 | |
| But, this is a useful hint to most pension and trust | 17:05 | |
| managers that their clients would in all likelihood | 17:10 | |
| be ahead if their turnover rates were halved. | 17:13 | |
| And their portfolios were more broadly diversified. | 17:17 | |
| You might say they also serve who only sit and hold. | 17:22 | |
| But, no doubt, the fees that I might earn as a consultant | 17:26 | |
| by giving such sensible advice and which portfolio managers | 17:31 | |
| might earn by following such prosaic behavior, are less | 17:38 | |
| than from trying to give it that old post-college try. | 17:43 | |
| What is it that logic can demonstrate? | 17:48 | |
| What it can demonstrate is that not everybody, nor even | 17:53 | |
| the average person can do better than the comprehensive | 17:56 | |
| market averages. | 18:00 | |
| That would contradict the tautology that the whole is | 18:03 | |
| the sum of its parts. | 18:06 | |
| Moreover what statistical probabilistic theory can suggest, | 18:09 | |
| this is not a logical theorem, is this. | 18:12 | |
| If you select at random a list, of say, a hundred stocks, | 18:16 | |
| and if you buy them with weights that are proportional | 18:20 | |
| to their respective total outstanding market values, | 18:22 | |
| although your sample's performance won't exactly duplicate | 18:27 | |
| that of a comprehensive market average, it will by the law | 18:31 | |
| of large numbers, come close to doing so. | 18:35 | |
| Closer than if you throw a dart at only one stock. | 18:39 | |
| But of course, you won't do as well with a sample, even | 18:44 | |
| a random sample, of a hundred stocks as you would with 200, | 18:48 | |
| 300, or using all the stocks that are available in | 18:52 | |
| the marketplace. | 18:57 | |
| Now, do I really believe what I've been saying? | 19:01 | |
| That judgment doesn't help. | 19:04 | |
| I'd like to believe otherwise. | 19:08 | |
| But a respect for evidence compels me to incline towards | 19:11 | |
| the hypothesis. | 19:15 | |
| Now it's only a hypothesis, that most portfolio decision | 19:17 | |
| makers should go out of business. | 19:21 | |
| They should take up plumbing, teach Greek, or just be | 19:24 | |
| ordinary corporate executives. | 19:30 | |
| Now, even if this advice to drop dead is good advice, | 19:33 | |
| it obviously isn't counsel that's going to be eagerly | 19:37 | |
| followed. | 19:40 | |
| Few people will commit suicide without a push. | 19:41 | |
| And fewer still will pay good money to be told to what | 19:45 | |
| it is against human nature and self interest to do. | 19:49 | |
| It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, "The will world beat a | 19:53 | |
| path to the door of the man who invents a better mousetrap." | 19:57 | |
| Let's amend that, the person that invents a better | 20:01 | |
| mousetrap. | 20:04 | |
| Well that shows what Emerson knew about economics. | 20:05 | |
| The Wells Fargo Bank out on the west coast sent out a trial | 20:09 | |
| balloon in the way of a sensible, non-managed fund that | 20:12 | |
| embodied essentially the whole market. | 20:18 | |
| The Standard and Poor 500 stock. | 20:21 | |
| It was even better than that because they enabled you to | 20:25 | |
| mix your own leverage at very low interest rates relative | 20:32 | |
| to the market so that sticking with the evidence you could | 20:36 | |
| do as well as the market with the sureness, and you could | 20:42 | |
| take advantage of the little bit of daylight that seems | 20:47 | |
| to be there in the way of the not perfectly equilibrated | 20:50 | |
| prices. | 20:55 | |
| What I have in mind here, but I don't want to digress | 20:56 | |
| too far, is that there is a little bit of evidence, | 20:59 | |
| that if you put your money into non-volatile stocks, | 21:03 | |
| you think that's the prudent way of investing, but it's | 21:07 | |
| the only imprudent way of investing. | 21:10 | |
| They do a little bit worse on the average than more volatile | 21:12 | |
| stocks. | 21:17 | |
| Now you would say, "How is that possible?" | 21:19 | |
| The volatile stocks, we're comparing cheese and chalk. | 21:20 | |
| They're very volatile, and how can you compare them? | 21:24 | |
| Well, the way you compare them is the following. | 21:29 | |
| You buy the non-volatile stocks on leverage, so by | 21:32 | |
| leveraging up your position you make them just as volatile, | 21:38 | |
| as the volatile stocks are without that much leveraging. | 21:42 | |
| Then you look at the average rate of return which has | 21:47 | |
| actually been earned over the years by a comprehensive | 21:51 | |
| portfolio of one as compared to the other, and lo | 21:56 | |
| and behold, and this is the only deviation practically | 21:58 | |
| from the random walk hypothesis that has ever been observed, | 22:01 | |
| and that has lasted as a valid observation, you could do | 22:06 | |
| a little bit better in the volatile stocks. | 22:11 | |
| Well, I think the Wells Fargo was in a position to take | 22:12 | |
| advantage of that. | 22:15 | |
| But, alas and alack, I don't believe that the world beat | 22:17 | |
| a path to the San Francisco door or Los Angeles door | 22:22 | |
| of the Wells Fargo Bank system. | 22:26 | |
| There's an organization in Boston, Battery Marts, that has | 22:29 | |
| likewise a scheme for matching the averages. | 22:33 | |
| All you need is perhaps a few hundred thousand dollars | 22:38 | |
| to get into it, and I may be wrong, but I don't have | 22:41 | |
| the impression that they're overflowing with inquiries | 22:47 | |
| and telephone calls. | 22:51 | |
| One of the American Express mutual funds has experimented | 22:53 | |
| with establishing an outlet for pension fund money. | 22:59 | |
| All you need is a million dollars I believe to get into it. | 23:02 | |
| But it's surprising how many, how few are the millions | 23:06 | |
| of dollars ready to go into these sensible mousetraps, | 23:11 | |
| these sensible instruments. | 23:17 | |
| In fact, one's left with the impression and an awful lot | 23:19 | |
| of underbrush has been growing up before the doors | 23:21 | |
| of these deviance into good sense. | 23:25 | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson, not withstanding. | 23:28 | |
| At the very least then, I suggest, some large foundation | 23:32 | |
| should set up and in-house portfolio that seeks to track | 23:35 | |
| and duplicate the S and P 500 Index. | 23:40 | |
| To do this, if only for the purpose, of setting up a naive | 23:44 | |
| model against which their own in-house gunslingers | 23:47 | |
| can measure their prowess. | 23:50 | |
| Instead, as you know, most portfolio committees bolster | 23:52 | |
| their self-esteem by showing they have done better than | 23:56 | |
| the Valuline 1500 Stock Index. | 23:59 | |
| And no wonder, that index being a geometric median index, | 24:02 | |
| I can outperform it merely by buying its stocks and | 24:07 | |
| its proportions. | 24:10 | |
| And I can do so both in down markets and up markets. | 24:13 | |
| Since money is only sophisticated enough to grow | 24:17 | |
| arithmetically, dollar on top of algebraic dollar. | 24:20 | |
| Algebraic dollar because it's loss as well as gains. | 24:23 | |
| I've seen the same thing in a recent report, some mutual | 24:26 | |
| fund, it shall be nameless, didn't do as well as the | 24:31 | |
| Standard and Poor's average, so they pointed out the index, | 24:35 | |
| they pointed out they did better than the average stock | 24:40 | |
| in the index. | 24:42 | |
| Well, they don't realize it, but they've shifted the ground | 24:44 | |
| to very close to the geometric mean because, I won't go | 24:47 | |
| into the details, it's the law of normal distribution, | 24:52 | |
| and anybody who buys all the stocks in the index will | 24:55 | |
| do better than the average stock in the index because | 24:58 | |
| the stocks that make a gain, make a much larger gain than | 25:00 | |
| those which lose on the average because the tail of | 25:05 | |
| the distribution is always skewed off to the right. | 25:11 | |
| That's true, by the way, in down markets and up markets, | 25:14 | |
| but I'd have to state the proposition a little more | 25:16 | |
| carefully. | 25:19 | |
| Perhaps CREF, which pioneered the variable annuity | 25:20 | |
| and the variable pension plan, it's the non-profit | 25:26 | |
| organization set up by teachers annuity, perhaps it can | 25:29 | |
| be induced to set up an in-house pilot plant operation | 25:35 | |
| of an unmanaged diversified fund, but I wouldn't like | 25:39 | |
| to bet on it. | 25:41 | |
| I've actually suggested to my colleague, Professor Franco | 25:43 | |
| Modigliani, who's going to be the president of the American | 25:46 | |
| Economic Association, in 1976, that economists might | 25:49 | |
| want to put their money where their darts are. | 25:53 | |
| That the AEA might, as a service, contemplate setting up for | 25:56 | |
| its members, a no load, no management fee, virtually no | 26:00 | |
| transaction turnover fund along the Sharpe Mossin Lintner | 26:04 | |
| lines of the academic theories. | 26:09 | |
| But I daresay there's so little supernumerary wealth | 26:13 | |
| to be found among 20,000 economists that you could do better | 26:17 | |
| if you tried such a fund among 20,000 chiropractors. | 26:22 | |
| For as George Bernard Shaw should have said, those who | 26:27 | |
| have don't know, those who know don't have. | 26:31 | |
| That's my twist on if you're so smart why ain't you rich. | 26:35 | |
| Well now how does one judge the validity of all this | 26:40 | |
| I've been asserting? | 26:43 | |
| We certainly don't want to replace old, tired dogmas | 26:45 | |
| such as be selective in the search for quality with | 26:48 | |
| new dogmas. | 26:52 | |
| However scientific is their nomenclature. | 26:54 | |
| But the sad truth is, that it is precisely those who | 26:58 | |
| disagree most with a hypothesis of efficient marketing | 27:01 | |
| pricing of stocks, who poo poo beta analysis, and all that. | 27:04 | |
| They're the one who are least able to understand the | 27:09 | |
| analysis needed to test that hypothesis. | 27:11 | |
| What do they do? | 27:15 | |
| Well, first they simply assert that it stands to common | 27:16 | |
| sense, a great effort to get facts and greater intelligence | 27:19 | |
| in analyzing those facts, will pay off in better performance | 27:23 | |
| somehow measured. | 27:26 | |
| But of course by this logic, the cure for cancer ought | 27:28 | |
| to have been found way before 1955. | 27:31 | |
| Second, those people always know a man, a bank, or a fund | 27:35 | |
| that does do better. | 27:40 | |
| But alas, anecdotes don't make science. | 27:42 | |
| And once the Wharton School dissertation writers seek | 27:46 | |
| to quantify these performers. | 27:49 | |
| They have a tendency to evaporate in air, or at least | 27:52 | |
| into statistically insignificant T-statistics. | 27:55 | |
| Well, let me sum up, I have to do it very briefly. | 28:00 | |
| It isn't ordained in heaven, or by any second law | 28:03 | |
| of thermodynamics, that a small group of intelligent | 28:05 | |
| and informed investors, can't systematically achieve | 28:08 | |
| higher mean portfolio gains with lower average | 28:12 | |
| variabilities. | 28:15 | |
| People who different heights, in their pulchritude and their | 28:16 | |
| acidity. | 28:19 | |
| Why not in their PQ or performance quotient? | 28:21 | |
| Any sheep with a billion dollars has every incentive | 28:24 | |
| to track down organizations with such high PQs. | 28:27 | |
| But as Frank Knight used to point out, paradoxically, | 28:31 | |
| it takes PQ to identify PQ. | 28:34 | |
| So, it's not easy to get off the ground. | 28:37 | |
| But anyone with special abilities, like those could earn | 28:40 | |
| a differential rent on that flair, which we economists | 28:45 | |
| call a rent. | 28:48 | |
| Those few with extraordinary PQ won't give away such rent | 28:50 | |
| to the Ford Foundation or their local bank trust department. | 28:55 | |
| They have too high an IQ for that. | 28:59 | |
| Like any racetrack tout, they will share it with those | 29:02 | |
| well-heeled people who can most benefit from it. | 29:05 | |
| It's a mistake though to think that so much money will | 29:10 | |
| follow the advice of those best talents. | 29:14 | |
| Inevitably as a matter of the logic of competitive arbitrage | 29:16 | |
| alone, that the rest of us will be left with white noise, | 29:19 | |
| random darts situations, in which every security of | 29:25 | |
| the same expected variability has the same expected mean | 29:28 | |
| return. | 29:31 | |
| Because for the nature of the case, there must always | 29:33 | |
| be an important measure of uncertainty and of doubt | 29:36 | |
| concerning how much of one's money one can entrust wisely | 29:39 | |
| to an advisor whom you only suspect of having exceptional | 29:43 | |
| PQ. | 29:46 | |
| Many of my academic colleagues fall implicitly in the | 29:48 | |
| confusion on this point. | 29:51 | |
| They think that the truth efficient market or random walk | 29:53 | |
| or more precisely Fair Martingale hypothesis, is established | 29:56 | |
| either by logical tautology or with the same empirical | 30:00 | |
| uncertainty, the same empirical certainty as the proposition | 30:04 | |
| that nickels sell for less than dimes. | 30:08 | |
| Well, we're left though, with the fact that if there do | 30:12 | |
| exists such talents, they are very rare and they are | 30:19 | |
| very hard to identify. | 30:21 | |
| This fact, although not an inevitable law, is a brute fact. | 30:24 | |
| The ball, as I've said, is in the court of those who doubt | 30:28 | |
| the random walk hypothesis. | 30:31 | |
| They can dispose of the uncomfortable brute fact, and | 30:33 | |
| the only way that any fact is disposed of, by producing | 30:36 | |
| brute evidence to the contrary. | 30:40 | |
| Host | If you have any comments or questions | 30:43 |
| for Professor Samuelson, | 30:45 | |
| address them to Instructional Dynamics Incorporated, 450 | 30:46 | |
| East Ohio Street, Chicago, Illinois, 60611. | 30:50 |
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