Beginning rant: finance academics equate volatility with risk. This has some intuitive plausibility. Volatility is also easy to measure and you don’t have to know much about actual financial markets. Using volatility as the principal measure of risk leads to odd conclusions, however.
For example: Portfolio A is either +/- 1% each week but is up by 8% each year; Portfolio B almost never changes and is up by 3% every twelve months.
Portfolio A will double in nine years; Portfolio B takes 24 years to double–by which time Portfolio A will be almost 4x the value of B.
People untrained in academic finance would opt for A. Academics argue (with straight faces) that the results of A should be discounted because that portfolio fluctuates in value so much more than B. Some of them might say that A is worse than B because of greater volatility, even though that would be cold comfort to an investor aiming to send a child to college or to retire (the two principal reasons for long-term savings).
more interesting stuff
–on the most basic level, if I’m saving to buy a car this year or for a vacation, that money should be in a bank account or money market fund, not in the stock market. Same thing with next year’s tuition money
–the stock market is the intersection of the objective financial characteristics of publicly-traded companies with the hopes and fears of investors. Most often, prices change because of human emotion rather than altered profit prospects. What’s happening in markets now is unusual in two ways: an external event, COVID-19, is causing unexpected and hard-to-predict declines in profit prospects for many publicly-traded companies; and the bizarrely incompetent response of the administration to the public health threat–little action + suppression of information (btw, vintage Trump, as we witnessed in Atlantic City)–is raising deep fears about the guy driving the bus we’re all on
–most professionals I’ve known try to avoid trading during down markets, realizing that what’s emotionally satisfying today will likely appear to be incredibly stupid in a few months. For almost everyone, sticking with the plan is the right thing to do
–personally, I’ve found down markets to be excellent times for upgrading a portfolio. That’s because clunkers that have badly lagged during an up phase tend to outperform when the market’s going down–this is a variation on “you can’t fall off the floor.” Strong previous performers, on the other hand, tend to do relatively poorly (see my next point). So it makes sense to switch. Note: this is much harder to do in practice than it seems.
–when all else fails, i.e., after the market has been going down for a while, even professionals revert to the charts–something no one wants to admit to. Two things I look for:
support and resistance: meaning prices at which lots of people have previously bought and sold. Disney (DIS), for example, went sideways for a number of years at around $110 before spiking on news of its new streaming service. Arguably people who sold DIS over that time would be willing to buy it back at around that level. Strong previous performers have farther to fall to reach these levels
selling climax: meaning a point where investors succumb to fear and dump out stocks without regard to price just to stop losing money. Sometimes the same kind of thing happens when speculators on margin are unable to meet margin calls and are sold out. In either case, the sign is a sharp drop on high volume. I see a little bit of that going on today
more on Monday