Current Affairs

  • A Look At Voting: 2016 vs 2020

    In order for our electoral process to work, voting has to happen. 

    For as long as I can remember, voting has been an issue – but this year turns that on its head.

    If you believe the current counts, Trump is behind Biden but still has more votes than he received in 2016.

    In this election, Biden tallied almost 79M votes while President Trump received 73M. In comparison, going back to 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote with 66M votes to President Trump's 63M votes. 

    Screen Shot 2020-11-15 at 5.19.15 PMvia Washington Post

    This year’s election had a massive difference in voter turnout.  In fact, more Americans voted in the 2020 election than in any other in more than 100 years.

    To put that in context, if "Did Not Vote" had been a candidate in the 2016 Presidential Electioni, it would have won by a landslide. 

    Did-not-vote-2016-update

    BrilliantMaps via 270ToWin

    Only 8 states and Washington D.C. had high enough voter turnout to elect an actual candidate. 

    For comparison – here's what 2020's results currently look like under the same circumstances. 

    MJ5udF1KutxbQR_ceXcZzWGzEy787wOD4iBeV92HjXE

    via Reddit (As of November 12th, 2020)

    In 2016, "Did Not Vote" would have received 471 electoral college votes, but in 2020, it only grabs 105 votes. 

    As an interesting side note, in 2016 neither candidate won a majority of the vote due to support for third-party candidates. In 2020, it seems Biden has narrowly grabbed a majority of the popular vote with 50.8%. 

    The numbers vary slightly from source to source, but the data for these numbers primarily comes from the United States Elections Project. 

  • Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading – November 15th, 2020

    The  upcoming holiday season seems a little different this year.
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    Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

    Lighter Links:

    Trading Links:

  • What Happens If A Presidential Candidate Doesn’t Concede?

    The election this year has proven that our electoral system is more complicated than most understand or care to imagine.

    Despite most media sources confirming Biden's election, President Trump hasn't conceded yet and is pushing for recounts. It's a reminder that a concession speech is a norm – not a requirement.  But, if that is true, what are the requirements?

    To find out more, watch this video on the US process – with 5M views – from TED.  Regardless of your opinion on the current state of the process, it's an informative look at the potential paths forward in this election. 

     

    via TED

    So, how do you think this will play out in real life?

  • When Trading Worlds Collide: Timeless Wisdom & Evolutionary Technology with Matthew Piepenburg

    Earlier in the Pandemic – in June – I had a Zoom meeting with Matthew Piepenburg of Signals Matter. Even though it was a private discussion, there was so much value in our discussion we decided to share parts of it here. 

    While Matt's understanding of markets is based on Macro/Value investing, we use advanced AI and quantitative methods for our approach. 

    As you might expect, there are a lot of differences in how we view the world, decision making, and the current market environment.  Nonetheless, we share a lot of common beliefs as well.   

    Our talk explores a number of interesting areas and concepts.  I encourage you to watch it below. 

     

     

    To summarize a couple of the key points, markets are not the economy, and normal market dynamics have been out the window for a long time. In addition, part of why you're seeing increased volatility and noise is that there are so many interventions and artificial inputs to our market system.

    While Matt and I may approach the world with very different lenses, we both believe in "timeless wisdom". 

    Ask yourself, What was true yesterday, today, and will stay true tomorrow? 

    That is part of the reason we focus on emerging technologies and constant innovation … they remain relevant. 

    Something we can both agree on is that if you don't know what your edge is … you don't have one. 

     

    If You Don't Know What Your Edge Is You Don't Have One _GapingVoid

    Hope you enjoyed the video.

    Let me know what other topics you'd like to hear more about. 

    Onwards!

  • Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading – November 8th, 2020

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    Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

    Lighter Links:

    Trading Links:

  • A Look at the Top 25 PE Firms

    PE firms sometimes take a bad rap, but many well-known companies have been saved by PE firms including Hilton, Toys'R'Us, and Energy Future Holdings. 

    VisualCapitalist put together a chart of the top 25 PE firms funds raised and their notable investments. Check it out. 

     

    PrivateEquityTop25-Infographic-8via VisualCapitalist

    In 2019, PE firms raised almost a trillion dollars, though the rate has dipped in 2020.

    That being said, the largest PE firm – Blackstone – has raised almost $100B over the past 5 years. 

    I expect PE to be much more active in 2021. 

    How about you?

  • The VIX Going Into The Election

    Tuesday is election night – so there's a lot of fear and uncertainty from both sides about the consequences. 

    So how do you track and understand that fear? With the CBOE's VIX. 

    The VIX is an index that's commonly known as the "fear gauge." It tracks how quickly asset prices move (or, in other words, their "volatility"). 

    While you can't invest in it directly, you can invest in derivative products like VIX futures, ETFs, inverse ETFs, and more. 

    The infographic below is a good primer, and you can download RCM's full white-paper here.

    6a00e5502e47b288330224e038c544200d-600wi

     

    Covid cases are building, the Senate didn't pass another support bill and is now adjourned until November 9th, and you have pre-election market jitters.  As a result, the VIX trading volume is hitting new highs. 

    Overall, a higher risk environment than normal. 

    For context, the VIX has averaged 26.30 since August but got as high as 82.69 in March. 

    In the past week, after a pretty bad S&P 500 sell-off,  it's gone back above 38. 

    There are many ways to study and use the VIX, but ultimately, tracking it in any form helps you understand the current state of fear in market participants. 

    I'd love to hear how you use the VIX or other tools to measure or forecast market stress and volatility.

  • The Art and Science of Economics

    Today, I want to focus on one issue that's a commonality in trading and economics. 

    It's the tendency for us, as humans to create stories about why things happen … even in the absence of enough data to . 

    The Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, gave a speech in October with a dizzying amount of statistics. His portion starts around the 9:30 mark.

     

    via Yahoo Finance

    In this talk, he mentions a lot of interesting stats, but notice how many are focused on the change (or rate of change) within a relatively small window of the available data. 

    Also, notice how he crafts a story around the direction of the numbers rather than acknowledging or contextualizing the numbers themselves.  This isn't inherently bad – but it's something to be aware of when interpreting what it means to you. 

    When making decisions, the direction and intensity of movement are important, but so are more objective measures. 

    Stories can help make us comfortable with a temporarily bad situation, but if you get lost in the story and aren't cognizant of the bad situation, it can be harder to correct. 

    In trading, traders often tell themselves stories about why a movement happened, but markets and economies are more complicated than any heuristic. Those stories can be helpful retroactively – but they're rarely a powerful predictor. 

    Economics and trading both have hard sciences behind them. You can look at technical indicators, you can look at historical events, and you can build algorithms with advanced technology that look for the patterns you miss. But it's what you do with those inputs that matters. 

    Mark Perry wrote an article about why "it’s really hard to ‘beat the market’ over time."  In it, he states that over the 15-year investment horizon, 92.43% of large-cap managers, 95.13% of mid-cap managers, and 97.70% of small-cap managers failed to outperform on a relative basis.  Stated differently, over those 15 years (from June 30, 2003 to June 30, 2018), only one in 13 large-cap managers, only one in 21 mid-cap managers, and one in 43 small-cap managers were able to outperform their benchmark index.

    It’s hard to admit to yourself that you aren't better than average. Nonetheless, over any period of time, this is true for half of us.  This "truth" is especially hard to accept for people who have achieved a lot in their lives and have the money to invest.

    The trick is to find a way to separate "luck" from "skill" … or to avoid being fooled by randomness.

    We live in interesting times!  The signal-to-noise ratio is already tough to deal with … and I suspect that we are in a period where we have to expect even more noise.

    I've written a couple of posts on Economics that might help.  Here are a few of the more popular ones, if you are interested.

    What stories are you telling yourself about the economy? About the markets? About the election?

    There's a difference between guessing and knowing, and knowing is more profitable!

    Be careful! 

  • Getting Rid of Cognitive Biases

    We make decisions all the time.  To make that easier, we use shortcuts to make processing more efficient, more effective, and more certain.

    At least it feels that way to us.

    Mental heuristics are great – they do often save us time or effort.  And, for many people, they enable better decision making. But, as with any generalization, there are exceptions that can be dangerous. 

    That's where cognitive biases come in; we have biases toward how we remember things, how we view ourselves, how we make decisions, and what we make things mean.

    We're all victims to them, to some extent. But hopefully, by understanding them and becoming aware of them,  we can limit their impact. 

    Here's a great infographic with 50 of the most common cognitive biases. Click to see the full-size image. 

    50-cognitive-biases-2

    via VisualCapitalist 

    For a bigger infographic with 180+ cognitive biases, click here. 

     

  • Are You Smart?

    I know a lot of smart people.

    I also know a lot of people that think they're smarter than they are (even the smart ones … or, perhaps, especially the smart ones). 

    It's common.  So common, in fact, that there's a name for it.  The Dunning-Kruger Effect.

    Have you ever met someone who's so confident about what they think that they believe they know more than an expert in a field? That's the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's defined as a cognitive bias where a lack of self-awareness prevents someone from accurately assessing their own skills. 

    Here's a graph that shows the general path a person takes on their journey towards mastery of a subject. 

    Dunning-w-captionvia NC Soy

    The funny thing about the above image… it's actually not a literal part of the paper on the Dunning-Kruger Effect. But it's now so commonplace that people report that chart as fact. A fitting example of the effect. 

    244667David Fitzsimmons via Cagle Cartoons

    In our daily lives, it can often be funny or frustrating to see the "victims" of this effect, but I'd warn you that we all have times where we're prone to this; and it's a sign of ignorance, not stupidity. 

    This is a problem with all groups and all people. Even if you already know about the cognitive bias resulting from the Dunning-Kruger Effect, you're not immune. 

    It should be a reminder to reflect inward – not cast aspersions outward. 

    Two different ways that people get it wrong, first is to think about other people and it’s not about me. The second is thinking that incompetent people are the most confident people in the room, that’s not necessarily true.

    Usually, that shows up in our data, but they are usually less confident than the really competent people but not that much… – David Dunning

    To close out, even this article on the Dunning-Kruger presents a simplification of its findings. The U-shape in the graph isn't seen in the paper, the connection that lack of ability precludes meta-cognitive ability on a task is intuitive, but not the only potential takeaway from the paper. 

    Regardless, I think it's clear we are all victims of an amalgam of different cognitive biases. 

    We judge ourselves situationally, and assume "the best".  Meanwhile, we often assume "the worst" of others. 

    We can do better … it starts with awareness.

    Progress starts by telling the truth.