(2020-03-14) Guinn Lack Of Imagination

Rusty Guinn: Lack of Imagination. I AM saying that treating the markets like a first-year banking analyst at Morgan Stanley – organizing a model completely around a single key variable – is a recipe for tunnel vision on that variable to the detriment of a million other things that matter. Not just things over some short, ‘irrational’ period – I’m talking about things that really matter to asset prices and returns over extended periods.

This behavior makes one blind to all sorts of things

The veil of uncertainty contains both uproariously positive and fiendishly negative series of events.

The problem is that analyzing these events and their effects probabilistically isn’t hard. It is impossible. Yet the machinery of our industry cannot go into quarantine. It must produce research! It must produce estimates! It must produce predictions! How does it do it?

The second blind spot still sits within the world of pure fundamentals, and is exposed to both uncertainty and risk. It is the tendency to underestimate the length and magnitude of chains of dependent events. (Coronavirus)

What happens to consumer behaviors after a month or two of social distancing? After a month or two of adapting to a life without available daycare? After a month of effectively homeschooling children? Is there a tranche of the public that remained loyal to local brick-and-mortar retail for some category of their consumption that will undergo a permanent transition to online shopping? Do consumption patterns change permanently in other ways?

And what of tourism? How long do tourists eschew Covid-19 hotspots? Cruise ships? Casinos? Ride-sharing? Will ALL the fashion and real estate and investment conferences that huddle in Milan come back in 2021?

Let me take the other side of this.

What if many of the companies and industries that die were negative ROI, good-capital-after-bad companies and industries that probably should have died long ago, but for the sweet succor of interventionist government?

The point, again, is not that we should allow ourselves to become overwhelmed by the range of potential outcomes or the fact that many of them simply cannot be predicted. It is to recognize that the effect of events on other events at times like this is to make fools of forecasts built on some expectation of cash flows over a defined period.

The “10% of NPV!” approach also creates a blind spot to a class of path-dependent effects which exist outside of pure fundamentals – that is, in the world of narrative.

think-tanks who are already furiously spinning out pro-autarky thinkpieces in recognition of the rapidly changing zeitgeist on international trade links.

Cartoons constructed from deterministic EPS macro analyses have one more trick to play on us. Only this one isn’t about blinders on the future. It’s about blinders on the past.

When Ben and I went independent back in 2018, one of the first things he wrote was the Things Fall Apart series. (2018-08-08-HuntThingsFallApart)

The Oldest Game is a clever construction in which two players in turn conjure identities capable of defeating the identity selected by the other player on his prior turn.

There are many ways to lose the Oldest Game. Failure of nerve, hesitation, being unable to shift into a defensive shape. Lack of imagination.”

The structurally bullish will warn us against failure of nerve. The traders will warn us against hesitation. The structurally bearish will warn us about being unable to shift into a defensive shape.

What we should be worried about is a lack of imagination.

Imagination to see with clear eyes the shocking capacity of uncertainty to embarrass probabilistic frameworks used incorrectly to model it.

Imagination to see with full hearts how vast the range of paths and outcomes can be when they are dependent on the path of critical, potentially transformational events.