Feb

3

The touchdown interception in the last second of the first half, changing the score from a likely 10-14 to 17-7, immediately brought to mind whether sports imitates the market. And of course the mistress had already thought of this going from -1/2% at 350 to +1/2 % at the 415 close on two occasions in the last 10 years, and the reverse on four occasions. In each case, the mistress gave the final outcome the next day, to the side that had the 3 50 advantage. perhaps to make it more realistic I should have reported 1150 to 1200 reversals.

Jim Sogi comments:

Don't forget the bad calls being reversed and changing the outcome. And the multiple fakes out of the hike. It just needs to fake one defender out to work. The full field reversals, like the 100 yard interception, feel like recent markets. Even at the last minutes of the game or quarter.

James Lackey adds:

As the regulators throw too many flags.

Gordon Haave responds:

I was thinking about the game in terms of stupid behavior that people engage in, over and over again. In football it is the "prevent defense. Teams play great D all game, then in the last five minutes shift to "prevent" defense, where they take out linebackers in favor of more backfield players. All it ever does in prevent the team from winning. This is why the endings of games are so high-scoring.

In the markets, people do all sorts of things to prevent them from losing lots of money, which only insure that they lose the game. Such examples include most of the technical rules, and the dollar-cost-averaging.

Scott Brooks replies:

What Prof. Haave is saying about dollar cost averaging is true if someone has a lump sum to invest. In that case, unless he thinks he can time the market, he should go all in. American Funds had a nice piece on this a few years ago showing two people who invested a lump sum each year. One did at the market high, the other did it the market low every year for a long time. Of course the person who invested at the market low each year got the best return, but the one invested at the market high still got an exceptional return.

However, DCA is not a marketing ploy for the masses, it is a salvation for them. It encourages them to invest on a monthly basis and be in the market each month no matter what the market is doing. It allows them to invest without worrying about the highs and lows of the market. It gives them peace of mind to invest when times are bad. It, quite literally, gets them excited about investing when the market is not so good.

DCAing is very important to Johnny and Sally Lunchbucket… even if they don't know it!

Also, Kurt Warner has been to three Superbowls. He's lost two and barely won one (see "The Tackle")

In both cases where he lost, it was the defense that let him down. I can't say for sure, but I believe it was the "Prevent Defense" that was at fault. In the case of "The Tackle", a porous defense came within 1 foot of losing the game as the clock ran out.

In each of his three Super Bowls, he played against one of the most highly rated defenses in NFL of that year. He and the offense did their job and scored enough points to win.

Kurt Warner should have three Super Bowl Rings in his collection instead of just one. Unfortunately, his defenses let him down.

Phil McDonnell adds:

The reason Dollar Cost averaging works is because it benefits from volatility. Individual stocks are more volatile than the averages so we would expect it to work better on the 30 individual Dow stocks than just on the Dow average itself. The fatal flaw in any strategy is that one needs to invest in stocks that do not go down. For DCA sideways is OK, it will actually make a little money. But if you put all your eggs in the Enron basket you are still broke, DCA will not save you.

About half of the returns of all the stock markets over the last 100 years are due to DCA. Reinvestment of dividends is a form of DCA. The average return in prices has been about 6%/annum. The dividend yield has been about 3% overall. So one would think that the returns if dividends are reinvested will be about 50% higher. In fact dividend reinvestment outperforms by 100% because of the subtle contribution of DCA.

Dr. McDonnell is the author of Optimal Portfolio Modeling, Wiley, 2008


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