Tackle Today: Tales of Diversification 📖 | Tackle Trading

≈ Grandma is always right. ≈

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

— Grandma

Yeah, she is right, as usual. What she forgot to tell us, though, is that there are literally hundreds of approaches to accomplish that same goal. Let’s take three successful investors and analyze, from a high-level standpoint, what are their pragmatic approaches to the eggs/basket enigma.

Warren Buffett preaches concentration, however, if you grab Berkshire’s SEC filings you will come to the conclusion that there’s more diversification there than in most portfolios you will ever encounter down the road. He seems to be heavily concentrated on business that he perfectly understand, and that’s quite a diversification.

“If you know that you are vulnerable to prediction errors, and accept that most ‘risk measures’ are flawed, then your strategy is to be as hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative.”. Taleb’s Barbell Strategy is utterly simple: nothing in the middle, like a barbell. On one end, hyper-conservative assets; on the other, the hyper-aggressive ones.

With the Paradox of Higher Returns with Lower Risk, Mark Spitznagel puts dynamic hedging in the spotlight. The Tail Hedge system he developed based on his studies in the Austrian School and market interventions by Central Banks, allows his clients to be hyper-aggressive by protecting their portfolios from fat-tail events. This provides room for a much substantial allocation on high-risk assets.

Financial markets are a sterilized environment, apparently leaving no room for conventional wisdom, like those of our ancestors. It never occurred to me that following grandma’s advice would signify thinking outside the box.

Chart of the Day: Barbell Strategy

“If you know that you are vulnerable to prediction errors, and accept that most ‘risk measures’ are flawed, then your strategy is to be as hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive as you can be instead of being mildly
aggressive or conservative.”
— Nassim Taleb —

Video of the day: Mark Spitznagel on the Paradox of Higher Returns with Lower Risk

Mark Spitznagel discusses the paradox of higher returns with lower risk.

Originally published at tackletrading.com on February 7, 2019.