The active asset management industry is overpopulated and hugely competitive, and, as with any sales activity, delivering the ‘appropriate’ message to prospective and incumbent clients is hugely important.  They are a range of common utterances from active fund managers, which feel as if they are intended to cultivate a certain image or manage client concerns, rather than present a realistic assessment of crucial issues. The types of statements listed below should be disregarded, or at least considered with a liberal dose of scepticism:

“ESG factors have always been at the heart of our investment process”.

“The growth in assets under management has not had a negative impact on our investment approach”

“We have reviewed strategy capacity and increased it by £1bn from our previous estimate”

“There is a bubble in passive strategies”

“Markets are not rewarding fundamental analysis”

“My (asset class / style / factor) is historically cheap”

“My performance has been driven by individual company selection, with no major impact from factor exposures”.

“We rarely use sell-side research”

“Even though half of the team have left to join a new firm we can continue to run an unaltered investment process”

“I spend 95% of my time at my desk on pure investment work”

“My CIO has given me their full support despite the difficult period of performance”

“The merger / acquisition / restructure has not been a distraction”.

“I think that interest rates are going to…”

“The performance fee structure means that we are perfectly aligned with our clients”

“We have an approach that can adapt to different market conditions”

“Having a team of 27 doesn’t hinder our decision making”

“All of our excess returns are from credit selection, being overweight credit risk hasn’t really been a factor”.

“I don’t think we suffer from any biases in our recruitment policy, it just so happens that the best candidates all went to the same universities and look the same”.

Although this post is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, there is an important point at its heart. If all firms and teams present themselves with a similar sheen, then there is a significant cost to being an outlier that is frank about problems, challenges and limitations.  This fosters an environment where openness and transparency are viewed as business risks.

Risk, particularly in finance and investment, is often framed in cold and calculating terms, but such an approach can often lead us to neglect its very human features.  More than simply an absence of certainty*; risk is about our inability to deal with probabilities in a consistent and coherent fashion, and the discomfort caused by the fact that “more things can happen than will happen”**.  How we perceive and experience risk is uniquely personal but at the same time hostage to our common behavioural limitations.

Central to our relationship with risk is how we are feeling at any given time. There is even a formal hypothesis for the role of emotion (or affect) in decision making called ‘Risk as Feelings’, in which George Loewenstein and colleagues argue that emotional reactions often dominate behaviour leading to our decisions diverging markedly anything that might be considered objective or rational[i].  How we feel about something tends to have an overwhelming impact on how we view the probabilities and potential outcomes.  An excellent example of this is psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer’s notion of ‘dread risk’, which he defines as a fear of low probability high consequence events.  Gigerenzer claims that a reluctance to fly following the terrorist attack in New York on September 11^th 2001 meant that more Americans lost their lives on the road due to their desire to avoid flying in the following three months than died as a direct result of the horrific attacks[ii].

Whilst dread risk suggests that we often hugely overstate certain low probability, high impact risks, there are other activities where individuals seem to ignore them entirely – for example, driving under the influence of alcohol.  This apparent contradiction is a prime example of the inconsistency of human behaviour.  When it comes to risk, the crucial issues are salience and availability. In Gigerenzer’s example, the emotional impact of the terrorist attacks were both severe and prominent in our thinking, thus the force of the potential outcome engulfed any rational assessment of probability.  Contrastingly, as we start the engine of our car and begin to drive home whilst intoxicated by alcohol are we likely to have any highly emotive examples of the potentially disastrous consequences readily in our mind?

This contradictory treatment of risk has also been evident when observing individual decision making in insurance.  Research has found that people are often underinsured against catastrophe risk – such as floods or earthquakes – even in situations where policies ae subsidized[iii].  Unsurprisingly, the likelihood that you will protect our home from disaster risk is not driven by a rational cognitive assessment of the potential costs, but by how fearful we are of the consequences, or how easily we can recall a similar situation – its availability.  If something hasn’t occurred for a long time or hasn’t recently stirred our emotions, we might simply disregard the risk entirely[iv].  The implications for investors of this type of behaviour are stark.

Salient, emotive and recent events can overwhelm our perception of risk and the investment decisions we make. It leads us to become complacent during prolonged equity bull markets and fearful in the midst of a bear market.  We can think of this as our erratic perception of risk continually shifting our personal discount rates.

Risk is perhaps the second most commonly used term in financial markets (second only to return). Despite its ubiquity and undoubted importance, it is often not clear what is actually being discussed.  The central debate about risk tends to be around whether it refers to volatility (how variable the price of an investment is) or the permanent loss of capital.  Quantitative strategies often rely on volatility as the central measure of risk for an asset or strategy, whereas more fundamentally driven investors will often claim that risk is the chance of losing money.  Both sides of this argument are right that their preferred measure is related to risk, but wrong to believe that there is any single concept that can encapsulate investment risk.

Let’s assume that we have two portfolios – one of 50 medium sized companies all listed on the stock market and one otherwise identical portfolio of 50 companies, but this time the companies are not listed – therefore their valuations are appraised rather than derived from public trading. Furthermore, the public portfolio can be traded on a daily basis, whereas the private portfolio is locked up for five years.  In essence we are contrasting one public equity portfolio and one private equity portfolio.  If we assume that the underlying positions are indistinguishable does this mean that the portfolios carry the same level of risk?

From a fundamental standpoint the answer must be yes – the overall outcomes will be driven by the underlying performance of the companies, but from a behavioural standpoint this is not the case.  The listed portfolio will suffer far greater price fluctuations than the private portfolio and offers the investor the ability to react to these variations (they can buy and sell); by contrast, the private equity portfolio will report smoother prices for the underlying securities, and the investor will be unable to trade – the less observable price fluctuations the less opportunity for us to react emotionally to them.  The behavioural risk (that we make bad decisions) is significantly greater in the public equity option than the private equity option.  This is by no means a validation of private equity structures, rather an example of how risk is about far more than the underlying characteristics of any asset.

Whilst the role of emotion and behavioural bias makes all types of decision making difficult there is an extra problem when we consider our investments.  Many important life decisions are discrete and made at a single point in time – whilst we will be subject to the behavioural  problems when buying a house, once we have made that decision it is not easy to reverse course – we don’t have to make the same decision over and over again.  For investments the opposite is true – once we make an initial investment decision the flexibility to change course means that we are forced to repeatedly face the same choices, but whilst the fundamental decision might be the same – our biases and emotions are likely to frequently alter how we perceive the risk in the decision.

Financial markets also lure us into being excessively diverted by what we might call ‘secondary risks’ or those that are subordinate to our primary objective.  For example, whilst our primary risk for our investments may be a failure to build a portfolio sufficient to maintain our standard of living throughout retirement, there will be a multitude of secondary risks such as suffering from short-term losses or our portfolio underperforming relative to peers or benchmarks.   We often make decisions to manage or mitigate these secondary risks, even if they jeopardise achieving our primary objective.  It’s not simply that we are thinking about risk in the wrong way, but we are thinking about the wrong risks entirely.

We continually discuss risk solely as it pertains to a particular asset or portfolio as if it is remote from the individual experiencing it – this constitutes a glaring omission.  Risk is about our individual differences, how frequently we check our portfolios, how we are incentivised, the last thing we saw on the news, recent stock market performance and how readily we can recall similar emotive examples – to name just a handful of contributory aspects.  Combining the freedom to trade at any time with our fluid view of risk is a potentially toxic cocktail.  Whilst attempting to manage and control such myriad of factors is a huge challenge for all investors, it is one which should not be ignored.

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* There is a theoretical distinction between risk and uncertainty, but they can be considered synonymous for the purposes of this post.

**This is an Elroy Dimson quote.

References:

[i] Loewenstein, G. F., Weber, E. U., Hsee, C. K., & Welch, N. (2001). Risk as feelings. Psychological bulletin, 127(2), 267.

[ii] Gigerenzer, G. (2004). Dread risk, September 11, and fatal traffic accidents. Psychological science, 15(4), 286-287.

[iii] Kunreuther, H. (1984). Causes of underinsurance against natural disasters. Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance, 206-220.

[iv] Kunreuther, H., & Pauly, M. (2015). Insurance decision-making for rare events: the role of emotions (No. w20886). National Bureau of Economic Research.

 

Given how unfathomable the game of cricket is for the uninitiated (and initiated) I am at pains to reference such a wonderfully convoluted activity; however, sometimes sport offers up such vivid examples of our behavioural biases in action that it proves irresistible subject matter. This was the case on Sunday when England won the Cricket World Cup for the first time.  Rest assured this post is more about our behavioural absurdities, than it is about cricket.

Before Sunday, the Cricket World Cup had been held 11 times beginning in 1975 and running every four years (approximately).  Despite being one of the pre-eminent teams, England had never won the tournament, but had finished runners-up on three occasions.  The 2015 World Cup saw a particularly dispiriting and ignominious exit for the England team, which brought about an overhaul of their approach to the game and an ambitious four-year plan to win the trophy when the competition returned to home shores in 2019.

England did indeed win the 2019 Cricket World Cup after overcoming New Zealand in Sunday’s final, but it is unlikely that this would have happened were it not for an outrageous slice of good fortune.  Without going into any unnecessary detail – very late in the game a ball took a wicked deflection off an England batsman after being thrown by a New Zealand player, which resulted in England being gifted extra runs through nothing but sheer chance. Absent this incident England would probably not have lifted the trophy.  Whilst all sport is to an extent defined by luck and randomness, it is worth highlighting that every ex-professional cricketer I have heard discuss this incident has said that they have never seen such a thing happen before. For it to transpire in such a pivotal match at such an important stage of the game is delightfully ridiculous.

It is not fair to say that England were lucky to win the World Cup – there was a great deal of skill that got them to the position to win the competition at all – rather they would have been unlikely to do so without the assistance of an unprecedented freak occurrence.

Following England’s victory, the immediate and persuasive narrative around England’s victory has been:

• The meticulous four-year plan to transform the game was an incredible success.
• The team fully justified their pre-tournament favourites tag.
• The players were able to handle the pressure of a World Cup final.
• The team proved their ability to win on a difficult pitch*.

These points all have a level of validity, but England probably only won the game because of a once-in-a-lifetime piece of luck – what if everything had been the same, but that outrageous deflection had not occurred? What would the prevailing narrative had been then?

• England’s four-year plan failed as they lose yet another final.
• The team didn’t live up to their billing as pre-tournament favourites.
• They didn’t cope with the pressure of a World Cup Final.
• The team can only win on ‘easy’ pitches.

The bounce of a ball not only changed the result of a cricket tournament and the lives of the England players, it transformed our perception of everything that led to that victory.  Clearly this is an absurd situation, the assessment of a detailed four-year plan cannot hinge on the random deflection of a ball; but this is the very nature of outcome bias – we take the result and then work back, viewing everything through the lens of that outcome.  Taking such an approach in activities where there is luck and randomness involved is hopelessly flawed.  We seem to operate with a binary narrative switch, which will flick between two entirely contradictory rationales depending on the result.

In my experience outcome bias is one of our most intractable failings, trying to persuade anybody to look past the result and consider the quality of the process underpinning it is nigh on impossible – you often look foolish even suggesting it.  Once the result is in, the narrative is fixed.

So why does the Cricket World Cup matter to investors?  Most sports are dominated by skill but punctuated with doses of luck – in many cases outcomes are actually a reasonable proxy for the quality of a process; for investment the reverse is true – it is luck and randomness with a smattering of skill.  This means we should be even more leery of outcomes alone telling us anything meaningful, but if anything, we are more reliant – performance frames and overwhelms virtually all investment activity and decision making. We are obsessed by the name on the trophy, and care far too little about how it got there.

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*Sorry, this is jargon and unnecessary detail.  Certain cricket pitches are harder to bat on and England were accused earlier in the tournament of being only suited to playing on easier pitches.

Despite it being most investors’ favourite pastime, we are terrible at forecasting; what we are much better at is talking about events that have happened as if they were inevitable.  If a certain path has been taken it is difficult for us to believe that any other routes were ever feasible or even available.  Whilst this creeping determinism or hindsight bias seems somewhat harmless, it is a damaging trait, which perpetuates outcome bias and leads us to believe that any past decisions made that were contrary to what actually occurred were foolhardy.  Diversification rarely looks sensible after the event – why didn’t you just own the best performing assets?

Having said that it is a serious issue for investors, I will now lurch toward frivolity.  If we go forward ten years, which outcomes will we be claiming were obvious ten years prior?  Some of the hypothetical comments below are more credible than others – I will let you decide which:

–  ‘Value investing was so depressed and had underperformed for the best part of a decade – a recovery was inevitable’

–  ‘US equities were the most richly valued major equity market by some distance, they were due a period of low returns and relative underperformance’

– ‘ The expected returns from a traditional 60/40 portfolio became so low it was simple common sense to increase exposure to alternative strategies, including hedge funds’

– ‘The US tech giants were expensive and facing severe regulatory scrutiny – their time in the sun ended a decade ago.”

– ‘With yields so low it is amazing that investors still held so much duration in their portfolios’

– ‘The vast flows into passive strategies were always going to highlight the flaws in cap-weighted indices, particularly in fixed income markets’

– ‘The Japanification of all major developed market economies was inescapable’

– ‘The return of inflation in major developed market economies was inescapable’

– ‘The long awaited stock pickers’ market finally arrived!’

Of course, we will actually be saying a host of different things – because the investment world is simply too complex, random and reflexive for us to make predictions with any level of confidence.  Taking this into account by making prudent and humble investment decisions now, will mean that some of these choices may seem illogical to our future self – but that is a price worth paying.