Mark Hulbert Get email alerts

Getting it right and still losing

Published: Nov 11, 2008 11:00 p.m. ET


Commentary: You can get a lot of things right and still lose big



ANNANDALE, Va. (MarketWatch) -- Sometimes you can't win for losing.

Just ask Harry Schultz. Or Howard Ruff. Or Jim Dines.

All three advisers, each of whom has been editing an investment newsletter at least since the 1970s, have built their investment careers by questioning conventional wisdom's trust in the soundness of the financial system. Not surprisingly, all three have been vociferous champions of gold and other precious metals.

You'd think that they would have cleaned up over the last year, since the disintegration of the financial system in recent months is almost exactly what they have been warning us about for decades.

But you'd be wrong.

Of the 181 newsletters on the Hulbert Financial Digest's monitored list, these three advisers' newsletters are in 173rd, 175th, and 176th places for year-to-date performances through October 31, with losses ranging from minus 64.9% to minus 70.0%.

How can this be?

The easy answer is that these advisers didn't put into their model portfolios the securities that would benefit from the financial collapse that they envisioned.

But that's not a very satisfying answer. Why didn't they construct their model portfolios around investments that would rise when the rest of the financial world was going down?

The answer, as I see it, has to do with how difficult it is to forecast when a collapse will actually take place. It's one thing to know that the financial system is shaky, and quite another to forecast when it actually will crumble. And these advisers would have lost even more over the last several decades had they bet aggressively on a collapse every time they thought that one was imminent.

In essence, these advisers came face to face with John Maynard Keynes' famous pronouncement that "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

In fact, it turns out to be surprisingly tricky to construct a portfolio to profit from an anticipated collapse. You can't just own securities that will skyrocket during such a collapse, for example, since they will lose huge amounts during the months and years you wait around for that collapse to occur.

As a result, advisers who worry about a collapse sometimes end up constructing portfolios that are not all that different from those of other advisers who are more sanguine about the health of the financial system.

The ironies are many.

Researchers refer to the consequences of these dynamics as the "limits to arbitrage." One famous study conducted in the mid 1990s by Harvard economist Andrei Schleifer and University of Chicago professor Robert Vishny, for example, found that arbitrageurs more often become momentum players rather than hedgers: Rather than betting against an apparently obvious mispricing, they often will bet that a mispricing will continue and become even more extreme.

That's the theory, at least. And it only partially applies in individual cases such as the letters edited by Schultz, Dines and Ruff.

But, clearly, these three advisers would have constructed far more profitable model portfolios this year if they had known that the financial collapse they have so long warned us about would happen in 2008.


MarketWatch Partner Center


We Want to Hear from You

Join the conversation