Showing posts with label fatal downside. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fatal downside. Show all posts

Wednesday 14 April 2010

Eliminate or severely limit your investments in companies with large downside risks to avoid huge losses

When you think that there is a large downside risk in investing in a company, you should be especially vigilant even if expected returns are high.
  • A highly leveraged balance sheet is one indicator of high downside risk in a company.  
  • Even countries that borrow large amounts of money are not safe:   Russia defaulted on its loans in 1998.
Since even a country the size of Russia can get into trouble, clearly you should never think of any country as "too big to fail."

By eliminating or severely limiting your investments in companies with large downside risks, you should be able to avoid the huge losses emanating from market volatility.

On the other hand, market volatility may cause good companies' stock prices to go down in the short run, giving you good buying opportunities.

Saturday 21 November 2009

Fatal downside and Wealth effect

Although the overall expected value of dice game version A is positive, there is one situation in which you should not play it - when the potential downside would be fatal or disastrous for you.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=te9MzyHoIN6EyuoHmfDxMaw&output=html

If you had just $1 in your pocket, played the game once, and failed to throw a six, you would be bankrupt.  The positive expected value of the game would be no help to you, since you would be unable to play any more - a fatal downside would have occurred.  In other  words, it is not enough just o look at the expected value of a decision.  The probability of a fatal or disastrous worst-case scenario has to be considered too. 

The presence of a fatal downside might temper your enthusiasm for a decision with a positive expected value, perhaps encouraging some kind of trade-off between expected value and the potential for exposure to a fatal downside.  You might be better finding another dice game perhaps a version that cost 10 cents to play, with a prize of 50 cents.  This would have the advantage of allowing you to stop playing before you went bankrupt, should you hit a bad losing streak.

By doing this, you would be spreading the risk around rather than going for an 'all or nothing' risk- trading off a better risk profile for a lower expected value.  (This approach to managing risk is known as 'diversifying'.)

In business terms, this translates into considering whether the downside of a risk, if it occurred, would result in bankruptcy or any situation from which the business could not recover.  The possibility of this, however remote, would have to be taken into account when contemplating a risk with positive expected value.

The fact that fatal downsides in investment loom much larger for smaller companies results in the 'wealth effect' - the relative ease with which larger companies can accumulate wealth.  They can take investment risk with positive expected values but serious potential downsides, because the fear of bankruptcy is more distant for them.  And the more positive-value decisions they take, the more money they accumulate and the more risks they can tolerate in their investments.  They can also afford to take more risks when considering and trying out new directions.  Individuals can also exhibit the wealth effect:  people with more cash saved up can afford to take bigger risks with their careers, perhaps allowing them to achieve greater successes.

It is the nature of know risk probabilities that the longer the run of risk taking, the closer one gets to the delivery of expected values.  This is how gambling becomes a science - with deep enough pockets (the wealth effect) and enough time, pay-offs come to reflect odds.  It is in the short run that 'luck' brings fortune or disaster.