# Market Misconceptions

Part 5 of the _Inefficient Markets_ sequence.

[I am not your financial advisor!
For educational purposes only.
Read [part 1](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rPe6b7MCxaK8ZzYdC/you-need-more-money) first.]

You, dear reader, are probably not average.
I expect a certain selection bias for readers of this blog.
You know how to use a spreadsheet.
You can probably write code.
You can apply mathematics to real life.
You're aware of your own cognitive biases, to some degree.
You understand why that's important.

Making good decisions under uncertainty is the very essence of trading.
As I said in part&nbsp;1, rationalists are already halfway to quant. 
Do you have any idea how much money is moving through those markets?
There's _gold_ in those hills.

So why aintcha rich?

Different readers may answer this differently,
but it may go something like this.

Because you haven't been trading. Why?
Because you don't know how. Why?
Because you never studied how. Why?
Maybe you thought you had better things to do.
Maybe you didn't think it was worth the effort.
Maybe you didn't realize how much we all need more money.

Maybe because you don't believe you can succeed.

Why?

## Trading Is Dangerous

Most retail traders fail to beat the index.
Monkeys throwing darts at newspapers do a better job of picking stocks than the pundits.
When you trade with borrowed money,
you can lose more than you invested.
For some people, trading is a ruinous gambling addiction.

## Successful Trading Is Impossible

The [_Efficient Market Hypothesis_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis) means you can't exploit the markets
They're random.
There's no such thing as [_alpha_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(finance))--reward for skill instead of risk.
Successful alpha traders are an illusion.
They're just lucky.
People also win the lottery, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a bad investment.

There's still [_beta_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_(finance))--reward for taking risk.
But the only way to get a higher return is to take on more risk.

### Not That Strong

The strong form of the EMH,
the idea that markets are perfect,
that even private information is reflected in the stock price,
is too strong.
The strong form is simply implausible given insider trading laws.
That these laws are a good idea is a matter of some debate among economists.
Nevertheless, the laws are there.

But you don't have insider information,
and probably couldn't trade it if you did.

The semi-strong form,
that allows for the possibility of private information not reflected in the price,
might as well be strong for you.

### Weak Is Strong Enough?

The Weak EMH means that there's no such thing as [_technical analysis_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis):
all past price, volume, and earnings information is already priced in.
Maybe there's some kind of [_fundamental analysis_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_analysis) that could work.
But the traditional fundamental methods don't seem that effective anymore.
You can't reliably outperform the market, at least in the short term.

Maybe you could get an edge if you hire a team of investigators,
to find the "public" information that isn't very accessible.
But it doesn't seem feasible for an individual.

### There Is No Alpha Left for Me

Maybe you don't accept the EMH,
but think you have to be some kind of trading genius who has dedicated his life to a specialty in finance and some kind of inside knowledge to have a chance.
That's your competition.
You don't really expect to beat these guys in a zero sum game, do you?
You can't win.

The only winning move is not to play.

Trading costs you spread and commission.
But if alpha can't be had, why bother?
Just buy the index and forget about it for ten years?
"I'm not a trader, I'm an _investor_," right?

Sour grapes!

You're not smarter than everybody.
But you're a rationalist.
You're smart enough.

## Trading Is not _That_ Hard

_A young mathematician began his lecture,
scrawling equations over several blackboards,
his esteemed colleagues looking on with reserved interest.
He droned on for several minutes,
until stopping mid-sentence, mid-scratch,
and with a look of intense concentration,
he erased and rewrote a few symbols.
And again.
Chin in hand, he regarded his work, for a time._

_"Huh."_

_Frantically, he flipped through his paper notes,
adjusting his spectacles to focus on the page,
which he turned, and turned again.
"It's not right!"
Finally at his wit's end,
he stormed out of the room in consternation._

_Fifteen minutes later,
bursting into the room,
with a spring in his step,
and a snap of his fingers,
he brightly interrupted his colleagues' quiet conversation with "It's trivial!"_

It's only hard until you get it.
Then it's trivial.
Sometimes.

Let's not pretend for a moment that successful trading is a trivial endeavor.
But [difficulty isn't a property of the task alone](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZTRiSNmeGQK8AkdN2/mind-projection-fallacy).
It's a relation between the nature of the task and the doer's skill.

This should not be physically taxing.
It's not like you're digging ditches.
You're clicking buttons and typing things into a computer.
And most importantly, it doesn't have to take 40 hours a week.

Let's not lose sight of our instrumental goal here:
decouple time from income. As much as you can.
If you've found an easier way (for you),
then by all means,
do that.
But trading seems like an accessible small business for the rationalist type.

## Trading Is Safer Than You Think

Because the markets are so efficient,
**the market doesn't punish you much for being wrong**,
as long as you take _reasonable precautions_.
You're unlikely to actually find much _negative_ alpha you're not looking for.
An efficient market will be fair to you.

The Three Laws are the reasonable precautions.
They give you a safe framework to attempt alpha trades from.
You must, of course, have a high enough level of confidence in your analysis,
but you are never going to be _certain_ of your edges,
even when you find them.
So diversify and trade a _portfolio_ of alpha strategies.
If some of them fail, so what? They won't hurt you, because you--

- [_DON'T PANIC_,](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ub4M6Yc3xA5TY2k47/repeat-until-broke)
which ensures that you trade systematically,
and not so frequently that you lose too much money on spread and commissions.
It's also a warning about giving up too easily.
Drawdowns are normal and expected even when your system works.

- [_Don't Bet the Farm_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fiPNjEGDbxy4mdhhT/how-to-lose-a-fair-game)
which keeps you from losing the fair games.
Wins and losses will tend to cancel out if you have no alpha,
because the market is efficient enough.

- [_Don't Fight the Wave_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pb6ZREpbBXyojqDT4/how-to-pick-the-wrong-side)
which keeps your portfolio on the right side of _beta_.
It compensates you for the inevitable losses from spread and commissions,
and gives a tailwind to your alpha trades that might otherwise be too small of an edge to exploit.

## Alpha Exists

You get a spam email advertising thinly traded penny stock that's about to go up.
Is this a good deal, or should you be worried?

The EMH is the [spherical cow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow) of finance.
It can be approximately true enough to be a useful assumption in liquid markets.

But understand that this is a shortcut to make some equations tractable.
It _can't_ be literally true,
even in its weakest form,
because technical alpha _exists_.

Alpha is any exploitable non-randomness in market behavior.
Simple [statistical tests of randomness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_tests) prove that while the markets are extremely noisy,
they aren't completely random.
If you're already familiar with any of these tests,
I would encourage you to download some price data and try them.
You might be surprised by what you find.
Can you exploit these patterns?
Now you're starting to think like a quant.

That spam is part of a [pump-and-dump scheme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump).
You are right to fear this,
but if you do,
you're admitting that _that market is not efficient_.
If you take the opposite side,
and [fade](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fade.asp) before the crash,
_that's an alpha trade!_

There are _degrees_ of market efficiency.
But scams aside,
even liquid markets bubble and crash.
The only difference is scale.
The effects of bias and ignorance are more pronounced for thinly-traded assets,
but liquid assets aren't perfectly efficient either.

Alphas are unstable.
They diminish over time,
eventually becoming unprofitable.
You do have to keep finding new ones.
But it can take longer than you might expect for an edge to dull.
Alphas don't persist simply because of secrecy.
There are cases published in the academic literature that still show up in recent price data.
And that's exactly the kind of alpha you can be most confident of.

Perfect market efficiency is [computationally intractable](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf),
especially when you consider relations between assets.
[Pairs trading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pairs_trade) is a notable example of this kind of effect.
There are many more pairs of assets than there are assets.
And this is even more true of baskets of more than two.
There are too many combinations for anyone to calculate.
We are not going to run out of alpha.

There are many other examples of alpha.
The rest of the sequence will be about how we go about finding and exploiting some of them.

[Part 6](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iiTcTYJpuWd5JhC8B/charting-is-mostly-superstition) is next.