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martedì 6 giugno 2017

Ingegneri vs Ecologisti SAGGIO

Progressives, Engineers, and Ecologists - Foolproof by Greg Ip
TESI: I DISASTRI SONO DESTINATI A RIPETERSI (MA GLI INGEGNERI NON LO SANNO). QUANDO NON SI RIPETONO PRESTO, ALLORA SI RIPETERANNO PIU’ VIOLENTI. COSA OCCORRE? LA PAURA.
***
In 1907 a terrifying panic swept New York’s financial markets… Three years later and thousands of miles to the west, massive forest fires broke out that burned across Montana…
Note: INCENDI E BORSE CHE CROLLANO Edit
Until then, western settlers accepted fire and businesses accepted bank panics as the unavoidable by-products of a civilization

Note: MA SIAMO ANCORA NELL’ERA DELLA RASSEGNAZIONE Edit
The two disasters marked a turning point in how Americans coped with chaos… more than a dozen distinct financial panics between its founding and 1907….
ECCO CHE PARTE LA SVOLTA: BISOGNA PORRE RIMEDIO. OCCORRONO SOLUZIONI.
There was available a solution: a central bank that could lend to banks
Note: PER LE CRISI FINANZIARIE LA SOLUZIONE SEMPLICE: UNA BANCA CENTRALE Edit
The Panic of 1907 shifted opinion decisively the other way. “It is the duty of the United States to provide a means by which the periodic panics which shake the American Republic and do it enormous injury shall be stopped,”
CAMBIO DI MENTALITA’
The fires of 1910 similarly altered the country’s attitude toward natural disaster.
Note: IL GRANDE INCENDIO DEL 1910 SOLLECITO’ I MEDESIMI IMPULSI: BISOGNAVA PORRE FINE A QUESTE DISGRAZIE
The logging industry wanted the trees for lumber; Theodore Roosevelt wanted them for national parks.
UN TEMPO L’ALBERO ERA UN FASTIDIO, ORA UNA RISORSA. INTERVENIRE DIVENTAVA NECESSARIO
Gifford Pinchot, a confidant of Roosevelt and the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, wrote a few months after the fires: “Today we understand that forest fires are wholly within the control of men…
Note:  POMPIERI E IL MITO DEL CONTROLLO Edit
He and his successors transformed the infant fire service into an organization devoted to preserving the woods
Note: NASCITA DEL POMPIERE Edit
A century later, panics and forest fires are still with us.
Note: MA UN SECOLO DOPO… Edit
Does this mean central bankers and forest managers were failures?
Note: POSSIAMO PARLARE DI FALLIMENTO? NO! Edit
Yet it was that very success that planted the seeds for future disaster and that illustrates the fundamental contradiction in humanity’s quest for safety and stability:
Note: NO: DOBBIAMO PARLARE DI SUCCESSO. SENONCHE’ E’ PROPRIO IL SUCCESSO A CREARE PROBLEMI... Edit
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COMPORTAMENTI COMPENSATIVI
In the case of forests, putting out small fires makes large fires more devastating, since fire suppression allows more leaves, brush, and other dead tree matter to accumulate on the forest floor, leading to denser forests.
Note: LA VIRTÙ DEL PICCOLO INCENDIO Edit
the natural tendency of the landscape to immolate.
FUOCO: UN FENOMENO NATURALE (E BENEFICO)
The ferocity of fires in recent decades is the consequence of a warming climate combined with the fuel provided by forest density that has been allowed to develop over decades of fire suppression.
Note: DENSITÀ DELLA FORESTA Edit
IN ECONOMIA C’E’ UN PROCESSO PARALLELO.
As for the economy, there is no shortage of theories about what produced the crisis of 2008. One popular culprit is private greed… Another is government: pursuing a vision of home ownership for all… Or maybe the crisis was the result of one of the mass obsessions that periodically sweeps the population, from tulip bulbs in seventeenth-century Holland to Internet stocks in twentieth-century America…
Note: FALSI COLPEVOLI DELLA CRISI FINANZIARIA: L AVIDITÀ... GOVERNO... ISTERIA Edit
the most important factor was the sense of safety that resulted from years of successfully fighting crisis and recession. The twenty-five years before the global financial crisis were unusually peaceful
Note: IL VERO COLPEVOLE: IL SENSO DI SICUREZZA Edit
VENIAMO AI TEMPI PIU’ RECENTI…
the “Great Moderation,”… choking with the fuel of leverage, risk, and complacency.
Note: IL SENSO DI SICUREZZA INDUCE A “GIOCARE” UN PO’ TROPPO CON LA LEVA FINANZIARIA Edit
Fear serves a purpose: it keeps us out of trouble.
LA FUNZIONE DELLA PAURA
Parents vacillate between walking their children to school every day to protect them from predators, and worrying they’ll grow up sheltered and unable to cope with life.
Note: UN GENITORE LO SA
***
two schools of thought. One, which I call the engineers… the other, which I call the ecologists,
Note: DUE SCUOLE DI PENSIERO: INGEGNIERI VS ECOLOGISTI Edit
engineering’s rise began with the Progressive Era in the late nineteenth… Alfred Marshall published his path-breaking Principles of Economics in 1890, but as Marshall noted, as a science it was “in its infancy.”…, Marshall made famous the supply and demand curves that every economics undergraduate today knows on sight…These tools persuaded experts that with enough study and will, the complexities of nature
Note: LA NASCITA DEGLI INGEGNERI IN ECONOMIA: ALFRED MASHALL
American Economic Association was founded in 1885, the Society of American Foresters in 1900, the American Sociological Association in 1905, and the American Planning Association in 1909… revolt against Gilded Age capitalist
COMINCIA LA PROGRESSIVE ERA. GILDED VS PROGRESSIVE Edit
Progressivism, the philosophy that government could be a force for both equity and efficiency…. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson… a more activist, muscular state… creation of a central bank modeled on those in England, France, and Germany… role of government sprung from social science….
IL MARCHIO DI FABBRICA DEGLI INGEGNERI PROGRESSISTI
One of his influences was Walter Bagehot… professional administrators in government.
FIGURA DI SPICCO
The basic tools now existed for engineers to manage the economy: new regulatory powers, a central bank, even an income tax…. Fed eagerly stepped forward to finance the federal government’s First World War effort…. This worked well throughout the 1920s, and leading economists concluded that the problem of depression had been abolished…
ORA GLI STRUMENTI PER IL CONTROLLO CI SONO! LE DEPRESSIONI SONO SCONFITTE. LO SI DICEVA NEGLI ANNI VENTI. POI… LA GRANDE DEPRESSIONE DDEGLI ANNI TRENTA.
what caused the Great Depression… One theory that emerged in the early 1930s was that the engineers had overreached.
CAUSE DELLA GRANDE DEPRESSIONE
Anything that remedied the Depression would interfere… This ecological view was shared by Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover’s Treasury secretary.
ECOLOGISTI DI NUOVO ALLA RIBALTA
If ecologists like Hayek and Mellon accused engineers of doing too much, engineers believed they had done too little… Fisher, for instance, laid the blame for the Depression at the feet of the Fed, for allowing deflation to take hold…The Fed, he said, had to restore prices and end deflation through expansionary monetary policy….
TROPPA INGEGNERIA O TROPPO POCA?
Herbert Hoover… He was a Republican who believed in letting market forces play out, but he was also, by profession and temperament, an engineer… Hoover thought Mellon meant well, but he dismissed his prescriptions and fought the Depression as best he could, for example setting up the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend to banks…
HOOVER… INGEGNERE O ECOLOGISTA?
Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933 and implemented a banking holiday, devalued the dollar against gold, and proceeded to overhaul the Fed and vastly expand the role of government. … Government could make things much better, or much worse. This was the revolutionary insight of the British economist John Maynard Keynes… business investment as driven by “waves of optimistic and pessimistic sentiment.”… If businesses were pessimistic enough, even interest rates of zero could not coax them to invest… Thus was born a role for the government… Franklin Roosevelt didn’t just expand the government’s responsibility for the economy: he also extended its oversight of nature. Since 1910, the Forest Service’s leaders were convinced that the only thing that kept them from controlling fires… The Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the New Deal’s largest job creation programs…unmarried men to work planting trees and fighting forest fires… The Depression only strengthened the conviction that the rivers should be harnessed for economic benefit… Thus, at the end of the Second World War, the engineers had assumed responsibility for much of the environment and the economy…
SU ROOSVELT E KEYNES IL DUBBIO NON SI PONE: INGEGNERI AL MASSIMO GRADO. NEL GIRO DI UN DECENNIO ECONOMIA ED AMBIENTGE PASSANO NELLE MANI DELLO STATO CENTRALE.
Within twenty years, though, fissures appeared in this new consensus. Neither the economy nor the natural world turned out to be as amenable… Gilbert White noticed that the frenzy of levee and dam building in the 1930s had not solved flooding… new problem: more homes, factories, and farms had sprung up on the floodplain… Starker Leopold… Called for the reintroduction of fire as a device for habitat management… Controlled fire was “the most ‘natural’…
CREPE NEL PROGETTO PROGRESSISTA: INCENDI E ALLUVIONI
University of Chicago, argued that government management of the economy was backfiring by failing to consider how people would adapt. George Stigler argued that regulators often ended up serving the regulated, not consumers… Sam Peltzman made an even more audacious claim: regulations aimed at making consumers safer might be doing the opposite… “risk compensation,”… “moral hazard”…
CREPE NEL PROGETTO PROGRESSISTA: MICROECONOMIA
Macroeconomic engineering faced a similar critique. Keynes’s… In 1967 Milton Friedman predicted that as workers got used to higher inflation, they would demand higher wages — negating any additional demand for labor… By the 1970s, he was proved right as both unemployment and inflation rose… Friedrich Hayek’s star rose as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan…
CREPE NEL PROGETTO PROGRESSISTA: LA MACROECONOMIA.
But monetary engineering — tweaking interest rates just enough to keep both inflation and recession at bay — not only survived; it was more popular than ever. Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, and other central bankers… unemployment and inflation steadily fell…
CIO’ HA DECRETATO LA SCOMPARSA DEGLI INGEGNERI? NO. MOLTE DELLE LORO SOLUZIONI SONO OGGI ROUTINE.
***

UNA FIGURA CHIAVE: Hyman Minsky
he also thought Keynesian models gave short shrift to the financial system. They assumed that the central bank had full control of the money supply, credit, and interest rates… money and credit didn’t depend just on the central bank but on financial innovation…. If, to control inflation, the Fed restricted the growth of lending by banks, then Wall Street’s innovators would come up with mechanisms to go around banks
UN KEYNESIANO CHE OBBIETTA A  KEYNES
The longer the Fed prolongs prosperity, the further finance progresses through these stages, and the more unstable the financial system becomes…. “Stability is destabilizing” sums up Minsky’s thesis…
LA STABILITA’ CHE DESTABILIZZA
engineers’ efforts to control the economy would ultimately be self-defeating… Because the financial system is always evolving, “the next financial crisis will never be just like the last one.”… His papers were more like essays, somewhat repetitive… Falkenstein, one of his teaching assistants and later a fund manager, recalls that his advanced classes were all classes in “Minskyism.”… he preferred to tell stories of the great economists
OGNI CURA E’ IL PRELUDIO ALLA MALATTIA SUCCESSIVA
Apart from being a difficult person, Minsky had another problem: his theory wasn’t very useful… Minskyism was antithetical to such elegant model… Confidence and credit would grow hand in hand, until some event caused them to break… When? Minsky didn’t know… “He always thought a market collapse was just around the corner,” Falkenstein recalled… Falkenstein sent his old mentor a letter, telling him, “I’m going to get rich off your theory!” Minsky was tickled…
UN MODELLO PASTICCIATO E INUTILE… MA PROBABILMENTE VERO
“What this country needs to shake us up and give us a little discipline is a good bank failure…. it would be healthier if people were a bit more scared…
COSA SERVE? UNA BELLA CRISI E UN BEL PO’ DI PAURA

Non sopravvalutiamo la vita, non sottovalutiamo la libertà SAGGIO

A Foolproofer’s Handbook: How to Make the Most of Our Best Instincts. Foolproof by Greg Ip
TESI: NON SOPRAVVALUTIAMO LE VITE, NON SOTTOVALUTIAMO LA LIBERTÀ.
IN FONDO UNA VITA E’ CIO’ CHE CONTIENE.
***
In the face of this irony, what should we do? Can we truly foolproof our surroundings if we so often cause more mischief in doing so? Or should we be ecologists and allow natural systems to take their course? At the end of this journey, I concluded that the answer is neither: we must reconcile the engineers with the ecologists. But how?
Note: DI FRONTE AL RISCHIO: PRECAUZIONI O LET IT BE? MEDIARE  Edit
***
IN LODE DELL'AZZARDO.
By providing confidence, moral hazard enables society to do things and take risks that it otherwise wouldn’t, many of which make us better off.
Note: LARRY SUMMERS: PRENDERE RISCHI CI DÀ QUELLA CONFIDENZA SENZA LA QUALE L'IMPRESA UMANA È IMPOSSIBILE Edit
safety is a state of mind, not a statute. You can write laws that tell people their bank can fail, their money market fund may not pay back a dollar per share, their home is not insured if a nearby levee fails, or their uncooked food might carry dangerous pathogens. Yet this won’t change their behavior if their experience tells them that banks never fail, money market funds always pay back a dollar, the levee always holds, and uncooked food never makes them sick.
Note: SICUREZZA STATO MENTALE. CONTA TROPPO LA PSICOLOGIA Edit
expunging moral hazard would also expunge confidence and all the beneficial risk taking that confidence enables.
Note: FIDUCIA E AZZARDO MORALE. DUE FACCE DRLLA STESSA MEDAGLIA Edit
Of course, we cannot endure a crisis and recession that cost the United States from $6 trillion to $14 trillion and do nothing. The question is, what can we do that won’t make matters worse?
Note: SIA LA SICUREZZA CHE IL RISCHIO HANNO UNA LORO FUNZIONE SOCIALE . CHE FARE PER SCEGLIERE LE DOSI CORRETTE? Edit
Summers is an engineer: he is a vocal advocate of using the macroeconomic levers of government to control inflation and raise employment,

Note: SUMMERS RESTA UN INGEGNERE: PROGETTARE LE PROTEZIONI Edit
Minsky’s aphorism that “stability is destabilizing.”
MINSKY INVECE E’ IL CLASSICO ECOLOGISTA. ECCO IL SUO MOTTO.
“The jet makes things better, it connects things in better ways, but the crashes are more dramatic. If you never invented the jumbo jet, you could never have a crash that killed more than two hundred people.
Note: IL CASO DEL JUMBO JET Edit
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IL PREZZO DI UNA VITA UMANA
Though it seems repugnant to put a price on human life, it happens all the time, when juries award damages for negligence resulting in death,
Note: PREZZARE LA VITA UMANA. TI RIPUGNA? MA LO FAI TUTTI I GIORNI, ANCHE CON I TUOI FIGLI.Edit
Federal agencies, for example, typically put the value of a statistical life at $9 million. Would you pay $9 million to save your own life (assuming you had $9 million)? Of course you would. Now let me ask the question slightly differently: would you pay $9 to reduce the chance of death by one in one million? Quite possibly not.
Note: 9 MILIONI DI DOLLARI BASTANO, NON SOPRAVVALUTIAMO LA VITA UMANA Edit
Bioethicists refer to the “rule of rescue,” the urge to help those we see are in distress, even when the help might better be devoted to serving a larger, less visible population. The rule of rescue can lead to very bad decisions.
Note: FUORI DI IPOCRISIA: A NOI NON INTERESSA LA VITA UMANA. INTERESSA LA VITA UMANA CHE VEDIAMO E TOCCHIAMO.
There is another cost that foolproofers must consider when trying to make us safer: our loss of freedom.
Note: C'È UN ALTRO COSTO TRASCURATO:  IL COSTO DELLA LIBERTÀ Edit
We really can limit danger and risk if we are willing to use rules, prohibitions, and jail time. This is one way around the Peltzman effect. If we worry that making an activity safer encourages more risk, ban the activity altogether.
Note: PROIBIZIONISMO È LA MEDICINA PIÙ EFFICACE PER AVERE SICUREZZA Edit
Opponents of seat-belt laws often base their arguments on freedom, not health. Despite overwhelming evidence that they reduce deaths and injuries, mandatory motorcycle helmet laws have been repealed in many states, often in response to litigation branding such laws an infringement on motorcyclists’ liberty and an unconstitutional exercise of police power.
Note: SEGGIOLINI E CASCHI: CHI SI OPPONE LL FA IN NOME DELLA LIBERTÀ 
***
QUANDO LO SPAZIO SALVA.
SPAZIO = SPAZIO DI MANOVRA.
SPAZIO DI MANOVRA = DIVERSITA’, ALTERNATIVE APERTE.
As I explored our efforts to create safety, I discovered one remedy that seems to work everywhere: space.
Note: IL RIMEDIO: TENIAMO LE DISTANZE Edit
For example, when I asked Adrian Lund of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety why aviation has had more success reducing accidents than automobiles have, his answer surprised me: “In aviation … it’s an easier problem to deal with.
Note: SULLA STRADA LA COSA È EVIDENTE: PERICOLO  INTERAZIONI. DA UN EQUIVOCO IL DISASTRO (IN ASSENZA DI VIE DI FUGA) Edit
My wife is a stickler for space. Early in her driving career, she learned that keeping space around your car is one of the easiest ways to avoid a collision.
Note: TENERE LE DISTANZE DAGLI ALTRI, IL GRANDE PRESERVATIVO Edit
Jadwin recommended the creation of a series of floodways — normally habitable land that would be allowed to flood to relieve pressure on the river.... By deliberately flooding less populated farmland, the Jadwin plan would protect the cities and more populated centers along the river....
Note: SPAZI DI SICUREZZA. ANCHE NEI DISASTRI NATURALI LO SPAZIO SALVA Edit
The financial and economic worlds have their equivalent of space: it’s called capital. This is essentially the cushion of shareholder capital that is available to absorb losses.
Note: L 'EQUIVALENTE DELLO SPAZIO NEL MONDO DELLA FINANZA: LA  CAPITALIZZAZIONE Edit
Capital has, correctly, become the central tool in regulators’ drive to reinforce the financial system against another crisis.
Note: PRIVILEGIARE IL CAPITALE DI RISCHIO SUL CREDITO.Edit
***
ALTRO PRESERVATIVO: PUNTARE SULLA MEMORIA.
That leads us to the final lesson of how to foolproof ourselves. As we have seen throughout this book, we often seek safety in response to fear, and fear is rooted in experience. The experience of crisis or disaster makes survivors more conscientious and risk averse. Houses built immediately after a hurricane are less likely to suffer damage in the next one....
Note: VALORIZZARE L' ESPERIENZA Edit
Moreover, experience is of limited help when disasters are rare. “One can be a particularly poor driver and never become involved in an auto accident,” note Donald MacGregor and Paul Slovic.
Note: MEMORIA: UNICA ARMA CONTRO LA RARITÀ DEI DISASTRI Edit
A country can change its attitude toward risk just as a company can. Canada drew praise in the wake of the global financial crisis for the fact that none of its banks failed or needed bailouts; indeed, they emerged stronger than they had been, an important reason Canada’s recession was much milder than that of the United States. This is often attributed to culture: the stereotype is that Canadians are more risk averse, less swashbuckling than Americans. There’s some truth to this.
Note: UN ESEMPIO: LA CRISI FINANZIARIA IN CANADA Edit
Yet the different experiences during the crisis are not all due to culture. Canadians are as susceptible to bubbles, fraudsters, and charlatans as Americans. Two small Canadian banks collapsed during the 1980s, and a crippling real estate depression laid many banks low in the early 1990s. Importantly, this left an imprint on both bankers and regulators... The Canadian government absorbed the lessons of the 1980s and 1990s as well. It created an independent regulator that steadily pushed banks to raise their capital sooner than its foreign competitors did...
Note: DISASTRI PRECEDENTI E  MAI DIMENTICATI Edit
The right tradeoff between risk and stability will maximize the units of innovation we get per unit of instability. It has taken us a century to learn that trying to put out every fire is a recipe for bigger, deadlier fires. The solution is not to let all fires burn, but to make it possible for small fires to burn without hurting people so that we save our resources for the big fires.
Note: E TORNIAMO AL PRINCIPIO GENERALE: EQUILIBRIO TRA DUE FUOCHI Edit

lunedì 9 gennaio 2017

Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo di rischio?

Il contrario del coraggio non è la codardia ma il conformismo
Rollo May
L'epigrafe di questo post è anche l' epigrafe del libro di Eric Falkenstein: “The Missing Risk Premium: Why Low Volatility Investing Works”.
La nostra nozione di rischio - e non parlo della vulgata ma di quella che si insegna all'università - è sbagliata...
... This book outlines an important flaw in finance and the academic notion of risk. It gets into how the original asset pricing model went wrong, why it is empirically bankrupt...
Sarà anche per questo che per la gestione di un fondo d’investimento un fisico o un informatico valgono quanto e forse più di un laureato in economia finanziaria...
... In practical finance, a computer science or physics PhD is generally more attractive than an economics or finance PhD mainly because that person knows more programming, which is useful...
La teoria sulla valutazione dei titoli che si insegna nell'accademia (Capital Asset Pricing Model, o CAPM) è la classica teoria continuamente confutata dai fatti che sopravvive nonostante tutto, un caso di scuola. Chi agisce sui mercati borsistici conosce bene questa falla e sa che deve inventarsi qualcosa...
... If you want to teach and publish academic papers, modern asset pricing theory is very useful, but it has about as much relevance as Das Kapital to any practitioner... the main ideas from modern asset pricing theory are the following: the quantity of risk is measured by a covariance with priced risk factors which are as-yet unidentified time series like the stock market, and there’s a linear relation between this risk metric and expected returns...
L' idea di fondo del CAPM...
... the main ideas from modern asset pricing theory are the following: the quantity of risk is measured by a covariance with priced risk factors which are as-yet unidentified time series like the stock market, and there’s a linear relation between this risk metric and expected returns...
In altri termini: esiste un rischio eliminabile attraverso la diversificazione di portafoglio e uno ineliminabile legato all' intero sistema. Chi si assume il secondo riscuote un premio di mercato, chi si assume il primo no. Ma questo premio non esiste nella realtà...
... The risk premium emphasis of modern finance is not helpful to someone trying to truly understand this field...
Se il CAPM non serve, come rimpiazzarlo? Per esempio con la conoscenza della storia. La storia delle bolle finanziarie...
... That is, the first key to investing is an understanding of history that comes from reading various accounts of the internet bubble...
Servono poi le relazioni personali che ci consentano di sentire chi sta sul campo in prima linea...
... Secondly, I would emphasize that finance is as much about personal relationships ...
Intuito informazioni riservate non guastano...
... Thirdly, that investing is like any other endeavor, where above average performance depends on some kind of edge, so if you have no reason to presume you have an edge assume it is negative and invest in assets where this hurts you the least...
Prendiamo un episodio noto alle cronache: il fallimento del fondo LTCM. È passato alla storia come un fallimento dell'accademia poichè si trattava di un fondo sponsorizzato da ben due eminenti premi Nobel. In realtà, a guardar bene, è stato il simbolo dello scollamento tra accademia e pratica poichè i gestori hanno ben presto abbandonato le strategie elaborate nelle università dai loro prestigiosi sponsor e il fallimento ha ben poco a che fare con le ragioni a cui deve la sua notorietà…
... A good example of the contrast between theory and practice comes from Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), the famed hedge fund that imploded in 1998. In theory, when it was working, outsiders thought they were using computer models to implement highfalutin theoretical insights from their two eminent financial theorists, Nobel Laureates Robert Merton and Myron Scholes. In practice, they put on some simple trades that were neither clever nor subtle, as they failed primarily due to a failed interest rate bet and a bet on volatility. Merton and Scholes were irrelevant to the investment decisions throughout, yet they were disingenuously presented for marketing the fund. That is the essence of modern finance: a rigorous, disingenuous façade, and a seat-of-the-pants practical side...
L'economia finanziaria è una materia ostica, un luogo di elezione di “uso intimidatorio della matematica…
... discussion of mathematics, as applied to finance, does tend to become excessively pretentious, pedantic, and irrelevant, and is primarily used, like Merton and Scholes for the failed LTCM, for impressing and intimidating the many mediocre people who can be intimidated by credentials and math...
Oggi il concetto di rischio è talmente pasticciato che di solito lo usano con sicumera solo due categorie di persone: imbonitori e confusi...
... Risk has become a concept like diversity or the Trinity, words that are either used by confused people of good faith certain that any inconsistency comes from insufficient understanding, or simple hucksters who use it as a red herring...
Sia chiara una cosa: criticare l'ortodossia CAPM non significa rigettare l'ipotesi dell' efficienza dei mercati (Efficient Market Hipothesys, EMH). E’ bene dirlo poiché spesso le due cose procedono insieme pur non essendo in relazione...
... Though I am a critic of standard approaches, I find myself generally agreeing with economists who represent these approaches more than their critics. That is, the most common criticisms of modern financial theory are based on the argument that markets are irrational or inefficient, with reference to behavioral finance and systematic biases. This highlights that it is not sufficient to note the current status quo is wrong but in precisely what way because this matters...
La finanza ci dimostra come non siamo genericamente avversi al rischio: dipende da quale rischio. La qualità è tutto. A volte il rischio lo cerchiamo, ci realizza dal punto di vista esistenziale...
... it’s as though a conspiracy were acting to keep everyone from noticing that the riskiest investments are not those with the highest expected returns but rather like lottery tickets catering to the deluded...
Nella teoria tradizionale, invece, si postula l’avversione a prescindere, e quindi un premio a chi è disposto a sopportare un rischio…
… The risk premium is an unobserved variable that connects the expected future payoff to the current price, and so price movements are often explained in terms of changes in risk…
I fondatori della teoria tradizionale e l’idea base che la sostiene…
… Seminal work by Markowitz, Tobin, and Sharpe created modern portfolio theory and the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) with its “betas.”…The basic idea of how the risk premium works is the following. An asset’s price is the present value of future payoffs, where the discount rate is the risk factor… The keys are risk aversion over aggregate wealth, risk measured as the covariance of the asset with the risk factors, and a linear price for risk (twice the risk generates twice the excess return)…
La teoria del CAPM ha letteralmente trionfato nelle università, i Nobel sono fioccati già da subito…
… The academic history of risk is usually presented as the crowning success story of the social sciences, with its cannon of heroes from Nobelists Harry Markowitz to Danny Kahneman… Peter Bernstein titled Against the Odds: The Remarkable Story of Risk… Like Prometheus, they defied the gods and probed the darkness in search of the light…
Ma oggi, anche nei cantori più entusiasti spunta qualche dubbio
… As Mark Rubinstein said about the CAPM and its extensions, “More empirical effort may have been put into testing the CAPM equation than any other result in finance. The results are quite mixed and in many ways discouraging.”11 Eugene Fama and Kenneth French called the CAPM “empirically vacuous,”…
Si potrebbe istituire un’analogia con l’etere
… It’s a bit like nineteenth-century physicists who assumed the luminiferous aether was present and kept coming up with more fanciful explanations for why it couldn’t be measured…
Fin da subito i fatti dicevano altro, ma la teoria era tanto bella, elegante, di buon senso e sofisticata allo stesso tempo…
… Although many have emphasized that empirical failure is caused by the subtlety of risk and expected return, consider beauty, which like risk in that it is omnipresent and subjective…
Una vicenda che ricorda tanto la psicanalisi
… In contrast, risk has devolved into something like Freud’s Oedipal complex, where a young boy presumably wishes to have sex with his mother and fears castration from his father, and this causes all sorts of issues. Most people find this absurd, but if you have ever met someone who invested in psychoanalysis, that person will just tell you the theory is much more subtle, so much so it is clearly nonfalsifiable…
Il rischio è “brutto” e sembra naturale che se lo carica sulle spalle vada pagato bene. Ma anche lavorare in miniera è brutto, tuttavia non viene pagato affatto bene. Nella teoria qualcosa non girava…
… In contrast, risk has devolved into something like Freud’s Oedipal complex, where a young boy presumably wishes to have sex with his mother and fears castration from his father, and this causes all sorts of issues. Most people find this absurd, but if you have ever met someone who invested in psychoanalysis, that person will just tell you the theory is much more subtle, so much so it is clearly nonfalsifiable…
Il principio “chi non risica non rosica” è coerente con la teoria ma non con la realtà: i giocatori avventati difficilmente si arricchiscono. Il giocatore non “investe”…
…The idea that to get rich you need to take risk seems to imply that risk begets higher returns, but this is just a logical fallacy, like using successful gamblers as role models for investing…
I giocatori avventati non si arricchiscono mediamente più degli altri perché, nei fatti, non esiste alcun premio di rischio, diversamente da quanto postula la teoria ortodossa…
… investing is much less rigorous, but much more difficult…
Guadagno e rischi presi: nessuna correlazione. Questo dicono i fatti, bisogna farci i conti, per quanto elegante sia la teoria che afferma il contrario.
L’accademia corse ai ripari: “il rischio è più complesso e multidimensionale di cio’ che sembra”…
… the academy has been quick to amend its previous theory with a simple addendum: risk is really subtle, multidimensional, and sometimes people are risk loving…
Voler mantenere a tutti i costi il CAPM ha comportato un degrado dell’ economia finanziaria e discipline connesse…
… The effect of a good theory is to make an accurate view of the world less complicated, not more, but instead modern researchers focus on the framework’s potential and its usefulness for post hoc rationalization…
L’assunto più problematico del CAPM: l’egoismo…
… There is just one necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a risk premium: standard utility functions, which assume that our happiness is solely dependent on our individual wealth and increases at a decreasing rate…
Sostituendo l’invidia con l’egoismo molti tasselli andrebbero a posto…
… If people are primarily envious, as opposed to greedy, the same logic that generates a positive risk premium generates a zero risk premium… if your benchmark is the average return of your peers, then the risk-minimizing strategy is to do what everyone else is doing… Although most of us don’t like to think we are driven by envy, most admit benchmarking against the consensus which is really just a semantic difference…
L’egoista misura il rischio sui rendimenti assoluti, l’invidioso sui rendimenti relativi: sarebbe la rivoluzione cambiare paradigma.
… Replacing “greed” with “envy” explains a lot more of the data…
Un crollo di sistema non implica grandi rischi poichè “relativamente” non subisco danni. Il pauroso, più che titoli solidi, cerca di “stare sulla stessa barca” degli altri.
L’invidia spiega anche il paradosso di Easterline: ci arricchiamo ma non diventiamo con questo molto più felici…
… This assumption is more consistent with a variety of other facts, such as that happiness does not increase as societies get wealthier…
Consiglio strategico: non rischiare, punta sui titoli a bassa volatilità
… The effect is for really high-risk investments to have the most delusional investors, the most opportunistic sellers, and pathetic returns. This would be a mere curiosity if the indexes did not indiscriminately weight equities regardless of this attribute. By ridding your asset classes of these objectively bad assets, you can improve your returns rather simply, and this has been demonstrated in real time via the dominance of low-volatility investing…
La gente in molti casi ama rischiare, di conseguenza paga poco chi si offre di rischiare al suo posto. La borsa non è diversa dalla vita, anche lì è bello rischiare. Si rischia perché ci si innamora di un titolo, oppure per hubris, o per non essere da meno (invidia), o perché si crede di sapere
… risk taking in investments is no different than risk taking in other dimensions of your life, something you apply in concert with your comparative advantage and in the right context. To the extent you take a risk without any specialized knowledge, expect to pay a price for the chutzpah of expecting to be rewarded for your hubris…
Ora vediamo meglio perché l’invidia è un’ipotesi preferibile rispetto a quella dell’egoismo….
…a relative utility function can explain the general absence of a risk premium…
L’ipotesi dell’ invidia è anche più coerente dal punto di vista evoluzionistico
… evolution favors a relative utility function as opposed to the standard absolute utility function, and the evidence for this is found in psychology, ethology, anthropology, and neurology…
Vediamo meglio quali sono i motivi che ci inducono a prendere rischi.
Il rischio in astratto non piace a nessuno…
…If risk taking did not pay off, presumably no one would do it because, by definition, risk is something we do not like…
Per i rischi presi in astratto chiediamo un compenso. Ma in che forma?...
... Risk taking, however, is unavoidable, and it does pay off, just not in the way implied by the standard model, where incremental amounts of risk taking, which is the same for everyone, pays off...
Facciamo il caso standard della riproduzione sessuale...
...Consider the optimal stopping problem... assume you are looking to get married and have kids, and your lifetime and fertility are finite... the question is about the optimal strategy (stopping rule) to maximize the probability of selecting the best mate... your choice relative to the optimal choice seen by an omniscient deity is invariably inferior...Both choosing to move on or staying with what you have involves risk; risk cannot be avoided...
Una lotta del genere riguarda  i maschi che, che potenzialmente possono avere migliaia di figli. Non per nulla sono loro i più propensi al rischio: per loro la posta in palio è più elevata...
... Males have to beat out other males to get access to females. Thus men built ships and traveled to far-off lands because those were the guys who had more children, whereas a bunch of women could bear children just as easily staying put....Everyone’s male ancestors have been disproportionately risk takers...
In altri termini, “non essere invidiosi” sarebbe un suicidio genetico. Noi discendiamo tutti da individui invidiosi propensi al rischio, gli altri si sono presumibilmente estinti...
... Risk takers dominate our lives via their disproportionate effect on our genes and their influence on our technology and culture...
Si dirà: ma la borsa - e l'economia in genere - non è la lotta per la riproduzione dove chi prende non lascia agli altri...
... One might say this is not relevant to markets where rational traders at the margin determine prices and returns....
Questo è vero ma di solito la nostra specie è razionale sulle regole più che sugli atti, il caso dell' altruismo è esemplare: essere generosi rafforza il gruppo (regola)ma è irrazionale da un punto di vista del singolo (atto). In altri termini: un mosaico di comportamenti (atti) irrazionali, si compone in poi in una società che funziona in modo razionale...
...given the multidimensional complexity of any asset class, where different trading tactics and complementary positions generate very different returns,... The economist Robert Aumann discussed the difference between rule and act optimality and gave the following example.148 In the ultimatum game... Most people reject an offer less than 20 percent of the pool. Economists see this as irrational because there is no upside... but Aumann sees it as rational in the general sense that one does not want to appear a chump, even if the appearance is just to oneself. The chump rule overrides our act rationality... humans have evolved to follow rules, as it is simply too costly to go through life without such heuristics...
L'altruista è un cardine fondamentale della società ma il suo comportamento implica l'assunzione di un extra-rischio: se il gruppo non lo gratifica è spacciato.
Tipico dell'uomo è l'innovazione, e innovare richiede rischio: se il progresso fosse solo “duro lavoro” sarebbe banale. Fallimento e rischio sono un acomponente della ricetta: l'umanità ha i suoi precursori a cui rende omaggio...
... People should see risk taking as a process of self-discovery... If some risk taking demands nothing of you other than willingness, it is surely foolhardy because such willingness is hardly in short supply, so these types of risks do not generate higher-than-average-returns as a general rule...
Quando prendiamo un rischio nella vita, per esempio in borsa, non è come tirare un dado, ci sentiamo ansiosi, ci sentiamo giudicati come persona anche se la componente fortuna è notevole...
... Yet it is precisely because real risk taking is quite different, making different decisions than the consensus based on a radically different interpretation of the objective odds implicit in the investment, that we experience anxiety....In practice, financial risk taking involves a great deal of anxiety, not about the realization of objective odds but rather sensing whether or not one has correctly ascertained the correct odds, what is called “ambiguity aversion....
È la distinzione tra giocare e investire: il primo atto implica distacco, il secondo ci coinvolge e ha implicazioni sulla nostra identità. Il tifoso e lo scommettitore sono persone radicalmente diverse anche se entrambe puntano su una squadra...
... Classic investors like J.P. Morgan and Benjamin Graham distinguished between gambling and investing, the former being simple exposure to randomness, the latter something amenable to special insight and intuition....
Ma perchè non diversifichiamo i nostri investimenti, come ci chiede CAPM?...
... Economists have long known the behavioral implications of the CAPM were incorrect. Investors are underdiversified...
È un po' come chiedere a un tifoso perchè non diversifica il suo rischio di sconfitta.
In borsa non è molto differente: il 25% degli investitori possiede una sola azione...
... 25 percent of investors have only one stock, and more than 50 percent owned fewer than three stocks... In practice, no one, not even the high priests of this view, act as if their theory were true whenever they discover a higher-than-average returning strategy....
Certo, potremmo concludere che siamo irrazionali, ma forse c'è dell'altro.
... Of course such person could be making an error himself, which is why these choices produce anxiety;...Below are the several reasons that could explain this preference for highly risky assets...
Altri fenomeni distorcono le previsioni da CAPM: vediamo un fenomeno che va sollo il nome di "maledizione del vincitore".
Di solito si ritiene che ci sia una saggezza della folla: la massa sbaglia in tutte le direzioni ma mediamente va molto vicina alla realtà. Ma in borsa, come nelle aste, il valore di un titolo lo determina chi offre di più, non l'offerta media. E qui entra in campo il teorema della "rovina del vincitore d'asta"...
... In the 1950s, they came up with the term “winner’s curse” to describe the fact that for auctions of offshore oil fields, winners were generally cursed by winning... If we assume that the average bid is accurate, then the highest bidder overestimates the item’s value. Thus the auction’s winner is likely to overpay....
Un' altro fenomeno distorsivo: l' errore per eccesso di fiducia in se stessi. Il 93%  degli autisti ritiene di guidare meglio della media...
... Perhaps the most celebrated overconfidence anecdote is Svenson’s (1981) finding that 93 percent of American drivers rate themselves as better than the median...
Ma gli esempi si moltiplicano...
... 90 percent of entrepreneurs think that their new business will be a success; 98 percent of students who take the SAT say they have average or above-average leadership skills...
La fiducia in noi stessi ci fa commerciare di più...
... Barber and Odean (1999) used overconfidence to explain why men, who psychological studies show are more overconfident than women, trade too much...
L' eccesso di fiducia spinge verso il rischio...
... People who think they are better than average at stock picking or picking mutual funds, will necessarily focus on the highly volatile stocks that generate better rewards for their prescience:...
La gente si sbaglia, e quanto più è intelligente, tanto più inganna se stessa...
... This involves constantly inflating our achievements and abilities and rationalizing our mistakes. For example, he noted that children not only lie, but lie more the higher their IQ...
Ma anche da questo eccesso di ottimismo è funzionale al gruppo: buttarsi è un po' come sacrificare se stessi per la conoscenza generale...
... Economist and Psychologist Danny Kahneman states this is the one bias he most wants his children to have because of its myriad benefits...
Perchè la gente si assicura e poi gioca al casino? Il suo rapporto col rischio sembra schizofrenico a volte. Anche questo fatto contribuisce a spiegare la disconferma di CAPM...
... Friedman and Savage (1948) were the first to really apply utility functions to financial decision making, and, interestingly, it was not the concept risk aversion that they concentrated upon but rather the paradox that people liked to gamble and buy insurance...
Altra spiegazione: l'evento raro fa notizia. Le cose di cui si parla vengono approfondite e generano una conoscenza che però è fatalmente incompleta.
... Stocks with higher volatility generate more news than less volatile firms...Stocks that are in the news generate lots of information that fiduciaries can use to sell their ideas to clients...generating lots of commentary and analysis...
Altra spiegazione: chi è troppo prudente segnala di non avere molte informazioni, di non essere introdotto, di essere uno sfigato. E questo è chiaramente un costo...
... to see if an investor is able to generate a superior return. That is, does she have alpha? Many people believe they have an ability to pick stocks successfully... if people believe that their short-run performance signals alpha, that information would be considered valuable regardless...
C'è infine un errore nel campione immaginario che abbiamo nelle nostre teste: le storie ad alto rischio ci restano impresse, da qui il "chi non risica non rosica". Questa convinzione ci spinge ad agire in modo distorto.
...some anecdotes are recalled... Almost by definition, any stock that rose tenfold was highly volatile over much of its meteoric rise... This is implied in the saying, “To get rich, you have to take risk....
C'è infine lo schema compensativo dei gestori di fondi: più il fondo guadagna, più si alza l'aliquota della commissione. Una convessità che rende conveniente una certa struttura di portafoglio. Anche la fama dipende dai picchi più che dalla media...
... The flow of investor funds is a highly convex function of fund performance: really high for the top decile but then evening out to almost indifference below the 50th percentile, rather like a call option...Bloomberg Magazine actually highlights analysts by their most profitable picks,...
Conclusione? Col rischio abbiamo un rapporto molto personalizzato, e la cosa non è certo limitata alla borsa...
... Those uncertain choices we make with incomplete information are not confined to finance, and indeed surveys show that the most prominent regrets in people’s lives are not portfolio choices but choices about careers, romance, and parenting....
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Ma perchè una teoria tanto cattiva è tanto popolare? Perchè l'invidia non rimpiazza l'egoismo? Un'alternativa che spiega meglio i fatti esiste!...
... the fact that low-volatility stocks outperform the basic indices.... the fact that low-volatility stocks outperform the basic indices...
Qui giova introdurre il concetto di fallacia moralistica: ciò che deve succedere, succede...
... While the naturalistic fallacy presumes that nature is what ought to be, the moralistic fallacy is the reverse: what ought to be, is...
Postulare l'egoismo semplifica i modelli e fa giungere a conclusioni chiare. L'invidia è una relazione riflessiva che rende instabili e imprevedibili i sistemi...
... If everyone’s utility is relative, it is difficult to talk about what societies should do. Economics loses a lot of its ability to objectively determine what to do...
Un'idea come quella di welfare rischierebbe di essere una difesa degli invidiosi... 
... With relative utility, aggregate wealth has no obvious implication for general welfare....
Anche il mercato potrebbe essere visto come uno spreco: il lavoro di Robert Frank è incentrato su questa idea.
Riabilitare l’invidia è difficile, con l’egoismo c’è più speranza. L'egoismo evoca cinismo ma sia Smith che Hayek hanno lavorato per riabilitarlo e farne un motore virtuoso della società...
... The assumption of individual optimizers was initially seen as a cynical assumption, but Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek highlighted how such narrow self interest can aggregate to counterintuitive socially beneficial outcomes...
Altri autori hanno poi sottolineato la compatibilità tra altruismo ed egoismo...
... Robert Axelrod and evolutionary biologists such as Robert Trivers showed that altruism is consistent with self-interest in repeated interactions...
L'economista ambisce ad essere scienziato ma mettere al centro dei suoi modelli una variabile riflessiva rischiava di renderli inutilizzabili e quindi di rinviare tutto al buon senso...
La persistenza del CAPM fa di questa teoria un caso per gli studiosi della storia della scienza. Un caso che ha comunque dei precedenti...
... Phlogiston, aether, Skinner’s behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism are all wrong,... you can never conclusively disprove a social theory...
Le teorie sbagliate ma inconfutabili abbondano nella storia delle scienze sociali.
Ci sono assunti che cementano una comunità e che allo stesso tempo l'accecano: l'aspetto della coesione comunitaria prevale su quello epistemologico. Lo si può dire della religione, della politica e anche della scienza...
... As Jonathan Haidt notes about politics, there’s a tendency to build a motivated ring of ignorance around sacred assumptions, those assumptions that simultaneously bind and blind...
Le persone molto dotate sono anche molto migliori nel razionalizzare...
... We are very good at rationalizing our prejudices... we see what we believe, and it is more important to have the correct biases than an objective and meticulous methodolog... Everyone knows that a little inaccuracy can save a lot of explanation,...
Eppure basterebbe tanto poco...
... Yet all it took was a simple cross-tabbing of beta with size, presented by credible insiders, to convince most people the standard CAPM model was untenable....
Forse il guaio è che occorre "troppo" poco... 
... the data I present here is a good example of evidence that is too unwieldy for a refereed journal. Academics like rigorous tests using a small set of econometric tests on single asset classes, so the error structure needs to be very particular... Some facts—like... stocks—are so simple, extended analysis would only obscure them...
Ci sono intere carriere costruite su CAPM...
... A major problem is that as most of the active and esteemed researchers have built their careers extending or modifying the current framework, it would be very costly to classify work built on bad assumptions as irrelevant,...
Un altro guaio sta nel fatto che CAPM non è rettificabile: le sue lacune lo rendono irriformabile...
... Yet the problem in asset pricing theory is not some second-order refinement, some inconsistency that occurs at extremes; rather, the entire framework is based on a profound mistake...
Ma tutte queste considerazioni hanno effetti pratici per un gestore di fondi?...
... My 1994 dissertation centered on the low returns to highly volatile equities, which then I argued was related to the incentives and preferences individuals had toward buying highly volatile stocks.... I received zero job offers from academia... Naively, I thought it was better that academia did not appreciate the insight because I could then apply my insight as a fund manager... I took a job as an economist with a regional bank in Cleveland mainly because it offered the potential to collaborate with the bank’s asset...when I approached several funds for some real capital, there was no interest... Every year or so I would send an academic version of my papers highlighting the low return to high-risk stocks to well-known academics, and the usual response was silence... I was arguing the world is flat.... Eventually, I did become an equity long-short portfolio manager at a hedge fund... The bottom line is that this insight has generated successful out-of-sample results to me personally...
La vicenda del CAPM costituisce una confutazione in piena regola dell'opera di Karl Popper...
... I have seen first-hand how data and theory are treated differently the model of science proffered by Karl Popper,... The truth will eventually be accepted for a variety of reasons, but it takes a while...
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