A Guaranteed Investment

You’re much more likely to become wealthy investing in your own ability to generate future production than you are by buying an asset that was actually someone else’s investment.
- Cullen Roche


Luke, being a securities analyst for the past three years, and I, having my Series 65 License (Uniform Investment Advisor Law Exam), frequently deal with a dizzying array of investment options and choices. There are literarily thousands of different investment options, all with varying risk-reward tradeoffs. While our roles are slightly different, Luke and I often sort through this barrage of choices to discern what is most appropriate given one's investment goals and financial objectives. However, there is only one investment that we recommend for everyone in every scenario - investing in themselves.

When people first hear of our profession, they often ask "What should I invest in?" Usually the answer is "It depends." Despite this, there is one piece of investment advice that we will give to everyone regardless of time horizon, risk tolerance, cash available, liquidity needs, etc. That is, "Invest in yourself."Whether that is spending money to attend an industry conference, buying a review package to study, or simply ordering Malcolm Gladwell's new book, investing in oneself involves making efforts, both monetary and non-monetary, to expand one's mind.

Now this is not meant to be a rainbows and butterflies and unicorns and 'everyone can succeed!' type post. Rather, it is meant to be general advice on a specific observation regarding the wealth accumulation process. There are two main parts to increasing the bottom line on your brokerage account - 1) your investment return and 2) how much you actually invest i.e. the amount of funds you save towards your account, whether that be through dollar-cost averaging or some other technique. Saving 2 percent of your gross income and earning a 15% annual return is not the same as saving 20 percent of your gross income and earning a 10% annual return. So how can one have more funds to invest and still live the lifestyle they want? The simple answer is make more money. Easier said than done, but through the aforementioned strategy of investing in oneself, one can greatly increase their earning potential. 

Do not hesitate to spend money on things that will improve your knowledge. Just as the definition of investment implies, one gives up something in order to achieve something else - in this case a broadened horizon, expanded circle of competence, or wider professional network is the potential return. This does not mean it is ok to waste money on any passing desire of material gain; rather, investing in oneself involves the same due diligence that is required for a financial investment. However, even though it still requires choosing certain things over others, what is different about investing in oneself is the fact that you will get out of it what you put in to it. Investing in yourself is in your control. The stock market is not. As a result, with dedication investing in oneself can have a guaranteed return.

Allow me to connect the dots to clarify what this post is getting at. There are two components to your investment account bottom line: the amount you save to invest and the return you get on your investments. The amount you save to invest is in your control which is correlated with how much money you make. This can usually be increased by improving oneself which involves investing in oneself. The return you get on your investments is not in your control. Therefore, it may be wiser to concentrate on improving earning capacity in order to save more rather than trying to identify the next hot stock.

-Joe

Prioritizing Tasks to Optimize Effectiveness

A great strategy to use to optimize one's effectiveness and productivity is to prioritize tasks by identifying them as belonging to a Urgency-Importance quadrant. Then, one can recognize what needs to be addressed in order to enhance their work effectiveness. The quadrant goes as follows:
Once categorized, individuals can then decide what really requires their attention. However, this is easier said than done.

Tasks that are "High Urgency, High Importance" will get done. These are the things that are due immediately and are obviously crucial to address. Typically, one does not need much self-control to do this category of tasks - their significance is obvious.

Tasks that are "High Urgency, Low Importance" are ones that demand your attention but really do not matter. Typically, these are time wasters. However, these are easily misunderstood. Due to the perception of high urgency, one may feel accomplished when completing these tasks, but in reality they do not do much in terms of progression. An example would be going through one's email inbox each morning. One feels pressure to respond in a timely manner but rarely are emails crucial. If the message were, it would more likely be dealt with by phone or face-to-face. And worse yet, sorting through one's email gives a false sense of accomplishment once completed.

As the name indicates, tasks that are "Low Urgency, Low Importance" matter very little and do not require immediate attention. One does not need much guidance when it comes to these tasks.

Lastly, tasks that are "Low Urgency, High Importance" are ones that may not need to be addressed for months or even years but have large consequences. These are the most misunderstood yet vital type of tasks. They are easy to put off; however, doing so can be detrimental to success. As mentioned before, these tasks require lots of self-control so they are best addressed in the morning.

It is important to identify two of the four quadrants in particular in order to optimize one's effectiveness. These two are "High Urgency, Low Importance" and "Low Urgency, High Importance." The other two are more obvious so they tend to be dealt with appropriately. One needs to be sure not to waste time with the "High Urgency, Low Importance" activities and not put off the "Low Urgency, High Importance" activities. Identifying and properly handling tasks in this way can  greatly improve one's effectiveness and productivity through time-management optimization.

-Joe

No New Friends

How many deep and devout connections do you have? I am not talking about soft connections or Facebook friends – I am talking about people you would not feel uncomfortable picking up from the airport: maintained and cultivated relationships. If you are as connected as I am through social media/technology, you would probably gander that the number is relatively high; it is not - it actually cognitively can’t be.

GORE-TEX: you may recognize it as the company that makes hiking boots, wet suits, ponchos and other weather resistant products. Oddly enough, this company is the subject of a popular narrative in the world of sociology. The company had humble beginnings like most start-ups. The founder, Bill Gore, literally set the company up in his basement. GORE-TEX was operated this way for many years until the Denver Water Company ordered seven and a half miles of their specialized waterproof, breathable material; this forced the founder to expand manufacturing capacity. The company continued to expand until one day Gore walked into his factory and “simply didn’t know who everybody was.” The founder recognized that the bigger the company was the less concerned the employees were with helping out each other, and helping out the company. Salesmen did not know the manufacturing team which created a lapse in product repairs and all around customer service.

Gore decided to cap his factories at 150 employees. This was guaranteed by the number of parking spaces he built outside new factories; when there were not enough parking spaces anymore, it was time to build a new factory.

“Dunbar’s Number” is the suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom we can maintain social relationships. This number was first postulated by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. His theory was that “this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size. The limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.”

What is Dunbar’s hypothesized limit? It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.

*Pictured above: Robin Dunbar, the British anthropologist pioneering research on human social behavior

 

 

*Pictured above: Drake, a man who clearly understands the cognitive restraints surrounding social relationships as elucidated by his verse in the song No New Friends.

Social media certainly enables relationships; this can be said with absolute certainty. But does it: A) replace existing relationships B) prevent additional relationships from forming or C) actually not build relationships at all?

We devote approximately 40% of our limited social time each week to just five individuals, often the most important people we know. Historically this number has been limited to five due to proximity issues and time restraints. Social media claims to have the answer. There is virtually no cap on how many internet “friends” you can have. If the world felt so inclined literally every person on the planet could read the words I am typing right now as the connectivity potential is innumerable.

Your great-grandparents knew the same people their entire lives. People did not move around like we do today, collecting pockets of friends everywhere we go; often we enter regionally fragmented friend groups without even leaving our couch via technology.

Having more technology does not make your neocortex bigger.

When asked if tools such as Facebook and Twitter have changed our capacity to handle social connections Dunbar stated:

“Apparently not at all; it is important to remember that the 150 is just one layer in a series of layers of acquaintanceship within which we sit. Beyond the 150 are at least two further layers (one at 500 and one at 1,500), which correspond to acquaintances (people we have a nodding acquaintance with) and faces we recognize.

All that seems to be happening when people add more than 150 friends on Facebook is that they simply dip into these normal higher layers. If you like, Facebook has muddied the waters by calling them all friends, but really they are not.

This isn’t to say that social-networking services don’t serve a useful function in facilitating our interactions with our “friends,” but what they don’t seem to do is allow us to increase the number of true friends.”

It is very easy to be overwhelmed by the potential for connections via social media/technology platforms, and it is true that much can be gained by leveraging these connections. However, it may be advantageous to keep the old saying “quality over quantity” in mind because unfortunately, our ability to maintain relationships is cognitively limited.

-Luke

Don't Play Hockey if You Were Born in the Summer

We are surrounded by successful people every day. Their image, routines and methods are screamed at us from all directions. Constantly, hope is driven into our minds, hope that we can one day be like them by taking the same paths they did. Joe and I have produced satire on the past on this matter, claiming to teach others “How to be Successful”. What I am increasingly discovering through reading and conversation is that success is not intelligence, success is not strength, and it certainly has nothing to do with using Old Spice (unless you’re grandpa Seiderman). Success’s genesis lies with opportunity, opportunity comes upbringing, upbringing comes from birthplace.

In the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell shares many anecdotes delineating the lives of some of the most successful individuals in recent history. One of the more notable examples was illustrated by the distribution of Canadian hockey players by birth date.

The following is a table showing the birth dates of the members of the 2007 Medicine Hat Alberta hockey players:

Source: Hockey players' birth months from Gladwell (2008)

Clearly, the above demographic data shows that an unusual amount of players are born within the first quarter of the year (Jan-April). A chi-squared statistic suggests this kind of result would be expected approximately 1/4^th of the time if the birth months were random. This was clearly done without efficacy.

How did those born in the first quarter of the year have such a clear advantage over those who were born in the preceding three? As it turns out, Canadian junior hockey leagues have a hard cut-off on January 1^st for league age groups. So for example a person born on January 2^nd of a certain year plays in the same age group as a person born on December 17^th of the same year. As a result, those four, five, six, etc. year olds who are born earlier in the year are slightly older than those born later in the year. This subsequently results in them being slightly faster, stronger, smarter, and so on; and these slight advantages compound over time, similar to financial interest compounding, turning into larger advantages. By the time these players reach the teenage years when they start being considered for more serious leagues, the slight age difference has compounded enough to make a noticeable difference. In these Canadian leagues with the January age cut off, success is a result of talent, but talent has to do with one’s birth date. The factors that are normally attributed to successful people are important, but those factors are a result of something that pretenses the beginning of the factors.

This idea is evident elsewhere. Bill Gates dropped out of college and became a billionaire; quite an extraordinary accomplishment. But what is not so obvious regarding his success is the fact that prior to founding Microsoft Gates had around 10,000 hours of programing experience due to his proximity to the University of Washington. As a young person, Gates would sneak out of his parents’ house to spend long hours using the University’s computers. This, in combination with his birth date (1955), put him in the best possible position to enter the technology revolution in the late 1970’s. His birth date put him at the age of 20 when he founded Microsoft: historically the most optimal time for a computer-driven analytical mind to be produced. How many other teenagers were given the opportunity to have unlimited free computer access time in the early 1970’s? Bill Gates has said “If there were 50, I’d be stunned”. 

Who else was born at the same time?

Billy Joy: 1954; Sun Microsystems, UNIX, Java

Steve Jobs: 1955; Apple

Eric Schmidt: 1955; Google, Apple, Novell

Tim Berners-Lee: 1955; World Wide Web

Sandra Lerner: 1955; Cisco

Similarly to Canadian hockey players, the above individuals can certainly attribute their opportunity to acquire their profession-related skills due to their birthdate. And in Bill Gate’s case, it also had a lot to do with his proximity to the University of Washington, a school that was a pioneer in the programming field.

Hockey players work incredibly hard to become professional athletes, and computer programmers spend thousands upon thousands of hours writing code and perfecting their skills to fill voids in the world of technology. Hard work is important to become successful; but the opportunity to work hard is just as important. The successful individuals we see as a result of our survivorship bias possess skills that appear to be essential contributors towards their great fortune. However, these skills are often simply results of events or opportunities that were completely and utterly out of their direct control.

-Luke

Insensitivity to Sample Size

When making a decision based on probabilities, make sure to consider the sample size of information the probabilities are drawn on. For example, consider the following problem:

A certain town is served by two hospitals. In the larger hospital about 45 babies are born each day, and in the smaller hospital about 15 babies are born each day. About 50 percent of all babies are boys. However, the exact percentage varies from day to day. Sometimes it may be higher than 50 percent, sometimes lower.

For a period of 1 year, each hospital recorded the days on which more than 60 percent of the babies born were boys. Which hospital do you think recorded more such days?

• The larger hospital
• The smaller hospital
• About the same (that is, within 5 percent of each other)

According to Tversky and Kahneman, most people judge the probability of obtaining more than 60 percent boys to be the same in the small and in the large hospital, presumably because these events are described by the same statistic and are therefore equally representative of the general population.

However, the reality is that the smaller hospital is much more likely to stray from 50 percent. This is because the smaller sample size results in greater variability than the larger sample size. Keep this in mind when presented with information based on a small sample size, whether that is over time or number of occurrences.

This is especially important in distinguishing between luck and skill. For example, consider the hedge fund manager who outperforms the market three straight years. This is less probable to be attributable to skill compared to the hedge fund manager who outperforms the market over twenty years. Again, this is because variability from the mean (in this case the market) is greater over a shorter time frame or fewer number of occurrences compared to a longer time frame or greater number of occurrences.

So how can we test this? One way is if the person can fail intentionally. If a person can fail intentionally, then chances are greater performance is due to skill, not luck.

Overall, be wary when someone presents information or probabilities based on a short time frame or small number of occurrences.

-Joe


source: http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teaching/Tversky_Kahneman_1974.pdf

The Prince

I recently finished reading The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. It is a political treatise written in the early 16th century and first published in 1532. It is something I have wanted to read for a long time. Widely debated, The Prince is essentially a practical guide for ruling. According to some of the informative context I read before beginning the book, "Machiavelli composed his treatise in order to prove to everyone, and to himself as well, that although he had been dismissed as Secretary (he was removed from his political position when a new group took over), he knew the art of the state better than anybody else in his time, and better even than the most revered political thinkers of antiquity, in particular Cicero and his modern followers."

Here are some noteworthy excerpts:

We have said above that a prince must have laid firm foundations; otherwise he will necessarily come to ruin. And the principal foundations of all states, the new as well as the old or the mixed, are goods laws and good armies.

A wise prince must follow such methods as these and never be idle in peaceful times, but he must turn them diligently to his advantage in order to be able to profit from them in times of adversity, so that when Fortune changes she will find him prepared to resist her.

A man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good. Therefore, it is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain himself to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge or not to use it according to necessity.

From this arises an argument: whether it is better to be loved than to be feared, or the contrary. The answer is that one would like to be both one and the other. But since it is difficult to be both together, it is much safer to be feared than to be loved, when one of the two must be lacking.

Since, then, a prince must know how to make use of the nature of the beast, he should choose from among the beasts the fox and the lion; for the lion cannot defend itself from traps, while the fox cannot protect itself from the wolves. It is therefore necessary to be a fox, in order to recognize the traps, and a lion, in order to frighten the wolves; those who base their behavior only on the lion do not understand things.

Men are so simple-minded and so controlled by their immediate needs that he who deceives will always find someone who will let himself be deceived.

Princes must delegate distasteful tasks to others, while pleasant ones they should keep for themselves.

Without a doubt, princes become great when they overcome difficulties and obstacles imposed upon them.

And above all, a prince should strive in all of his actions to achieve the reputation of a great man of outstanding intelligence.

Prudence consists in knowing how to recognize the nature of disadvantages, and how to choose the lease sorry one as good.

The first thing one does to evaluate a ruler's prudence is to look at the men he has around him.

Therefore, a prince should always seek advice, but when he wants to, and not when others wish it. On the contrary, he should discourage anyone from giving him advice unless he asks for it. But he should be a very frequent questioner, and then, concerning the matters inquired about, a patient listener to the truth.


Overall, I would recommend reading this historical piece by Machiavelli.

-Joe

Subtractive Knowledge

Subtractive knowledge is the term for the idea that the most robust knowledge consists of understanding what is incorrect and what to avoid. An excerpt written by Nassim Taleb says the following:

We know a lot more what is wrong than what is right, or, phrased according to the fragile/robust classification, negative knowledge (what is wrong, what does not work) is more robust to error than positive knowledge (what is right, what works). So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition - given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.

In other words, it is easier to identify what to avoid compared to what to strive for. For example, one can more easily become rich by avoiding enormous debt, expensive divorces, and get-rich-quick schemes compared to trying to come up with the next brilliant idea.

Ali Bin Abi-Taleb (no relation to Nassim Taleb)  suggests that keeping one's distance from an ignorant person is equivalent to keeping company with a wise man.

Surrounding oneself with those of superior knowledge is a great strategy to become more intelligent. However, it may be even more crucial to avoid those who make poor decisions. As the saying goes, "If you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas."

Part of the reason this is true is because Black Swan events tend to be negative more often than positive. So it is more important to avoid the negative than strive for the positive. And while Black Swan events are theoretically unavoidable and unpredictable, one can build systems that are antifragile to these events, rather than trying to prevent the statistically inevitable.

Steve Jobs describes his take on this concept with the following quote:
You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done.

While there are limitations, negative knowledge (subtractive knowledge) is more robust than positive knowledge (additive knowledge) for two main reasons:

1. Negative knowledge is less prone to errors
2. Black swan events tend to be negative more often than positive; therefore, negative avoidance is more crucial than striving for the positive. (or rather even more ideal, being anitfragile to these events)

As a result, it can be more advantageous to ask "What should I avoid?" compared to "What should I do?"

-Joe