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December
01
2017

The Ant and the Grasshopper
Jared Dillian

I’m sure you’ve heard the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. The ant busted his ass all year growing some grain to store for the winter, while the grasshopper was laying about, playing the fiddle. When winter came around, the grasshopper had no food, so he went to the ant’s house to beg for some. The ant told him to beat it, and the grasshopper starved to death. The end.

This tweet was getting retweeted all over the place last weekend. Apologies for the bad language.

For starters, the guy’s Twitter handle is “bitstein.” But anyway. This is the fable of the grasshopper and the ant.

The ant is busting his ass, schlepping into work every day, trading and analyzing securities, making liquid markets, providing clear social benefits.

The grasshopper is a “ponzi monkey hitting refresh 50 times a day,” according to Twitter user @prestonjbyrne. We’ll see who’s got something to eat when winter comes.

At the top of the cycle, there are always people who look down on the working stiffs, the ants. Actually, it seems like the loudest voices in finance these days are people who tell you to be long SPY, Amazon, or even bitcoin—unhedged. I don’t think we should be denigrating people who think it’s prudent to wear a seat belt.

Getting Rich Slow (with an Option)

I’m a big fan of getting rich slow. But I should add a caveat. I’m a big fan of getting rich slow with an option to make more.

I am channeling Taleb here. A wonderful portfolio strategy is to put 90% of your money into safe assets with a stable return—and to speculate on long shots with the remaining 10%, stuff that can give you 10x or 100x or 1000x returns.

Of course, bitcoin falls into that category, but you could argue that the bitcoin ship has sailed—we’re in full tulipmania now. 2014 would have been a nice time to have that idea1. Now, it is too late.

It is too late for a lot of longshots—venture capital, cryptocurrencies, Internet stocks… the 100x returns have already been made. Yes, there is always a bull market somewhere, but the trouble with investing in 2017 is that there are bull markets everywhere.

This is why I am a big proponent of wearing a seatbelt. It’s stupid to be short or flat, but it’s prudent to be careful. Will you miss out on some upside? Possibly. Will you miss out on the downside? Yes, that is the point. Just like the ant—slow and steady wins the race.

Captain Moonshot

So why are moonshots so popular? You wouldn’t buy Amazon at a $580 billion market cap unless you thought there was a reasonable probability of it reaching a $1 trillion market cap. Or even a $2 trillion market cap! Who knows—anything is possible.

But that sentiment—anything is possible—is not always present. There are some points in history where it seems like nothing is possible. That was the case not long ago—in 2009.

If you know a little bit about finance, you know that valuing equities without dividends can be tricky, and a lot of it depends on your assumption of what a “terminal value” might be. This also depends heavily on interest rates, which happen to be low.

So, lots of ebullience + easy monetary policy means these moonshots have very high valuations. With a little foresight, we might have been able to predict that these conditions would develop—but I think no reasonable person thought it would go this far.

No Shame

If you’re the ant, schlepping back and forth to work, you have nothing to be ashamed of. Please, please, please, do not have fear of missing out. Fear of missing out is currently manifesting itself in the number of Coinbase accounts exceeding the number of Schwab accounts.

You may think watching other people get rich is bad. But there is nothing quite like the smug satisfaction of sitting on a pile of grain in the winter, with the grasshoppers starving outside, and knowing that all the schlepping paid off. Sure, some people just have a higher tolerance for risk. Their life isn’t complete unless they are watching their net worth rip around at a rate of 15% a day. There has always been a fine line in this business between investing and speculating. Reflect a little on which one you have been doing.

1Someone actually pitched me on Ripple (XRP) few years ago and I was sold on the idea. I fully intended to do the heavy lifting on how to buy some of that stuff, but life intervened and I never got around to it. Shame on me.

Jared Dillian

A financial writer like no other, Jared Dillian is one of the industry’s most original, entertaining, contrarian voices. He is a master of market psychology and has been called “the Dr. House of trading,” with a staunch following ranging from casual investors to professional traders and hedge fund managers.

From 2001 to 2008, Jared worked at Lehman Brothers—first as an index arbitrage trader and then as head of the ETF trading desk. During this time, he routinely traded over $1 billion a day in volume.

He left Lehman Brothers to start a market newsletter for investment professionals, The Daily Dirtnap, which has been published continuously since 2008. Jared also currently writes Street Freak and The 10th Man, which have a combined readership of more than 200,000.

His memoir, Street Freak: Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers, was named Businessweek’s #1 general business book of 2011, and his first novel All the Evil of This World was published in 2016.

He is a regular contributor at Bloomberg View, Forbes, and other outlets. His media appearances include MSNBC, Bloomberg TV, The New York Times, LA Times, Business Insider and dozens of local and syndicated radio programs. Additionally, he is a teaching associate in the graduate business program at Coastal Carolina University.

He graduated from the United States Coast Guard Academy in 1996 with a B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science, and received his MBA from the University of San Francisco in 2001. He lives in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

 

 

 

www.mauldineconomics.com