I said that it was possible to disagree with the market, provided there was sufficient evidence. This would seem to me the very opposite of luck.
We can talk about luck vs skill, though. It’s a juicy topic. We’ve had gamblers on these very boards claim that they can win at the slots, of all games, because their technique with randomness is so advanced. If people can maintain delusions about winning a game of pure chance with a machine specifically designed for independent trials – and they do – then they will similarly maintain delusions about winning a game where skill typically plays a non-zero but nevertheless small component. This is not to dismiss the existence of skill. It’s just about impossible to read about Michael Burry, profiled in The Big Short, and believe he was one of the lucky ones. If the story is accurately told, then that was as close to pure skill as anything in the investment community comes. However, that doesn’t mean that the typical investor who times their short-sale correctly is also similarly skilled, as opposed to lucky, and even more importantly, a few anecdotes about a few select people being completely right at one time in one particular market situation does not provide us with any tools about how to consistently differentiate between luck and skill across many markets and longer time periods. If the boy who cries “wolf bubble” eventually turns out to be right, is that luck or skill? Should we listen to the investment consultants who have correctly predicted nine of the last five market collapses?
John Paulson was probably the biggest winner of the subprime collapse. What an authority! Many investors flocked to his fund to take advantage of his oracular vision… only to lose massive amounts of money as his apparent predictive power subsequently flagged. Was it originally luck? Was it skill? If skill, where did his skill go?
I don’t deny skill, but the problem with these sorts of skills is that they are, unfortunately, inescapably linked to a fallible human mind. The world is always changing. New shit is always happening. The picture in our heads which we use to understand the world, even if it is a correct picture that was skillfully created by many years of experience, can nevertheless become archaic overnight with one shift in the fault lines. A person who has been enormously successful one time, with one model, will almost invariably over-rely on that model in the future even though the world has changed. The fisherman who’s worked his coast the last two decades is naturally an expert in his local waters, but only until the tsunami comes. We’re skilled until we’re not. How do we find experts that never fall behind the times, never get too focused on their little territory so they don’t miss the wider waves?
The EMH is not true, but as fictional abstractions go, it’s one of the more useful ones I know. What it warns against, most of all, is human pride and hubris. I, as an individual, can’t possibly know everything. The market will fairly consistently give the most reliable estimate, based on the information available. It’s not even remotely close to perfect, but in many contexts it tends to be the least wrong of all the sources of information we have available. Yes, sometimes people are dead right to bet against the market. But how am I supposed to figure out who they are? And even if they get one big important thing right, how am I to know they will continue to get things right in the future? How are we to know all of the secondary consequences as the shockwave spreads, when people like Paulson couldn’t cope? Knowing that housing is a bubble is one thing. Knowing that the Fed will allow the biggest drop in NGDP in the aftermath of the housing collapse is something else entirely. The downturn we experienced wouldn’t have been nearly as large without the subsequent, and preventable, drop in aggregate demand. It was a failure of political will. How can people possibly predict that?
I’m willing to listen to alternatives, if there is data. It seemed fairly clear there was a housing bubble going on (though I for one didn’t have the slightest idea of the broader possible repercussions). The problem is, there is seldom convincing data against the market (though, yes, you listed two very relevant examples). And the good thing about the market is… that it will eventually correct. I’m willing to listen to alternatives, but my own habit will always be to look first to the institution that is always in the process of updating itself, rather than relying on fallible pride that a single individual can somehow consistently find the truth better than a system which by its very design acts to aggregate the information of many people, nearly all of whom with access to small pieces of relevant esoteric knowledge that others necessarily lack. If we add government regulators to the mix, whose incentives even in the best of circumstances are not perfectly aligned with the greater good, we should been even more wary of trusting their prideful judgments instead of looking to the market. This refusal to look at the evidence by mostly well-intentioned government regulators is pretty much the whole European experience right now
The market will be wrong in some way, come the next big political sea change, but so will almost every individual person. Even if some people end up with the “right” decision, they’re nevertheless likely to be right for lucky reasons. What we have is a tool, and we shouldn’t expect perfection from it, just accept that it’s usually the best we have available.