Price

What’s so wrong with socialism?

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As a concept, socialism is appealing. It’s idyllic, it seems to diminish unfairness, promote the less-fortunate, favor equality, all good things. So what’s the problem?

The true problem with socialism is an economic one. It’s about simple math.

Socialism seeks to operate an economy, or society on the whole, by rules and regulations set by a small group of people in power.

Conservatives mainly criticize socialism as a system that misplaces incentives. While humans do operate by incentive, and socialism does skew incentives, this is not the most helpful critique. Socialistic regimes have imposed different forms of incentives throughout history, like fear of torture and death, to coerce their people into desired action.

There is also a basic problem with the idea that a few people should hold so much power over many. Regardless of the purity of a person, power generally corrupts. But, like the incentive criticism, this is not the most basic problem of socialism. The truth is, even under the most compassionate, just, caring leadership in the history of the world, socialism would still be doomed to fail.

The problem of socialism is, at its most basic, a problem of pricing. A truly free market is an incredibly efficient way to set prices and wages. Whenever there is too much of a good, demand (prices) goes down, and businesses and people react by creating less of that good. Whenever there is a shortage of a good, demand (prices) goes up, and businesses and people create more of that good. In a free market, this happens quickly, automatically, and constantly. Communication stems from millions of data points (decisions, knowledge, people) occurring every second of every day accurately determining what people want and delivering those goods.

When a government or ruling body steps in to set prices or fix wages (the standard operating procedure of socialism) instead of letting the market make a determination based on supply and demand, that body is bound to fail. Any group of people, regardless of their level of training, IQ, ambition, morality, etc. can never have a complete understanding of the millions of data points, decisions, and knowledge swirling within the market every second. A few people simply can’t know as much as the several billion people on earth collectively know.

Because of this, a set price or a fixed wage will necessarily result in waste (too much of a good) or lack (too little of a good). This state of mispricing, given enough time, will result in the collapse of society.

An example of wage-fixing can be seen in modern-day minimum wage policies. Minimum wage is an attempt to promote justice and protect the less fortunate from evil greedy companies; an understandable inclination, but unfortunately a worthless solution. In a free market, wages increase naturally (with bumps along the way) as demand for labor increases. In socialism, wage-fixing makes it difficult or impossible for some businesses to hire employees at a price they can afford, even if potential employees would be glad to work for such wages. At worst this creates an insane situation where businesses aren’t allowed to hire people who want to be hired, at best the market is inhibited and incentives are skewed (business may be more likely to hire contract employees or part-time employees to avoid additional costs required by regulation). A much more effective way to thwart greedy capitalists is to give the market space to create better jobs.

Socialism, as economic practice, will always necessarily fail. No group of people can ever possess the collective information of the entire market, and so they will never be able to accurately allocate resources and set prices.

There are only two ways to invest (part 2)

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carolina-pimenta-J8oncaYH6ag-unsplashSo we’ve identified the two basic ways you can invest. That’s great, but how do you know which one to choose? Let’s talk about the active option.

Active investing feels right. We’re active people after all. We shop around for deals, we love sales and Facebook Marketplace. We check weather forecasts on the regular, we set future plans on our calendars. We do research before we buy things (some of us perhaps to a fault), we read reviews, we ask our friends. All of these things are active. So then active investing just seems like the normal way to do things, look for underpriced companies, do some stock research, make a prediction about the future, nothing too out of the ordinary, right?

There’s just one small problem, investing isn’t like normal life. We’ve got really smart people positing that the stock market is efficient, which means there aren’t actually and sales or deals on underpriced companies. Sure, stock prices will generally move upwards, but not because a company is underpriced. New news and information comes into the market and affects stock prices, new things happen that we can’t know for sure beforehand are going to happen. Research into specific stocks is great, professionals are doing it all of the time, but no one person can possibly have a complete understanding of a company, let alone how unknown events in the future will affect the company. There’s just too much data to make picking stocks a long-term viable strategy. Predictions in the stock market are not like weather predictions, we don’t have a radar watching a storm-front move in. And if people believe there is a storm front coming, it’s already priced into the stock prices because again, the market is efficient.

It’s really tough to be a good active investor. Even professionals fail to outperform the market at an extraordinary rate (over the last 15 years, 92% of active funds trading in the S&P 500 have underperformed the S&P 500), and even those who seem to be good at it tend not to repeat their performance. So maybe you’ve guessed by now, I don’t advocate active investing. If you really believe that the market is not efficient and that you or someone you know has a special ability to buy and sell the right stocks at the right time then active investing is the way to test your belief. Unfortunately, the odds are not in your favor.

In part 3, we’ll talk about the alternative option.

There are only two ways to invest (part 1)

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If you’ve faced an investing decision at any point in your history you know it can be daunting. Maybe you’ve reviewed your 401k options within the plan at your work, how in the world should you decide which funds to use? Maybe you’re feeling the pressure to start saving for your future, how do you decide who would manage your hard-earned savings well? Conduct any amount of research and instead of settling anything you’ll find innumerable different philosophies and strategies and a lot of recommendations to ‘invest in what you believe in.’ Well, I’m going to try to help you understand the first decision you have to make.

The first decision is actually pretty simple, there are only two options because there are only two ways to invest. You can invest your money actively or passively.

  1. Active means that either you yourself or someone you delegate to selects stocks and investments they believe will do well. At work in active investing is a fundamental belief that the market is not all that efficient and smart people can achieve better returns by only investing in the ‘right’ things.
  2. Passive investing means that you don’t try to choose the ‘right’ companies or even market sectors. Instead, you own the whole market and hold it passively. At work in passive investing is a belief that the market is mostly efficient, and probably better at setting prices based on supply and demand than you are.

You certainly aren’t done making investment decisions when you’ve answered this question, but it’s the first thing you need to interact with. So when you start evaluating, start with this question, will you be an active or passive investor?

We’ll dig into these options in part 2.

Index bubble

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This passive investing/index bubble idea from a Michael Burry interview continues to circulate. The idea has appeal, not the idea that another recession is imminent, but the idea that we could accurately predict one coming, and that the cause could actually make sense to us. The argument is fairly simple. A larger percentage of people are buying index funds, especially the S&P 500, than ever before. Index fund investors tend not to analyze each company in the S&P 500, they simply buy the index which owns all of them. So Burry worries that since fewer and fewer people are conducting analysis on company fundamentals, the prices of these companies are going to be inflated by virtue of the simple fact that they’re included in an index, not because they’re good companies that people believe in. That makes sense. The question then, is how much analysis and trading do we need in order to maintain a decent level of price discovery in the market? If index funds stifle price discovery, how do we avoid a bubble? Here are a few responses:

  • Even a small amount of price discovery (studying fundamentals, making trades, supply and demand) makes a huge difference for prices to reflect value. We don’t need large swaths of the market conducting analysis.
  • If 100% of invested assets were in index funds the price discovery argument might hold some weight. You would have to assume that there would be almost no company fundamental analysis happening, not an unreasonable jump but still an assumption. However, the truth is that only about 45% of invested assets are in index funds, and there’s still a host of investors and dollars outside of passive index funds working to set prices.
  • Index investing actually adds data to the market, it contributes to price discovery. Instead of contributing data on specific stocks, it contributes to larger market sector data as people commit dollars to different indexes across the world, which is helpful market data.
  • Despite the growth of index fund investing, global stock trading volume has actually remained about the same over the last ten years. People use passive vehicles to actively trade. Many index fund dollars are in ETFs among the most traded funds on the market. Just because money is in index funds does not mean that it’s passive. The activity all contributes to price discovery.
  • Some passive investors (like us!) actually do use some fundamental analysis in constructing portfolios (structured funds). And even our passive investors occasionally make trades; in order to rebalance, when they make contributions or withdrawals, etc. Even the most passive investors contribute to price discovery.
  • If the market was losing efficiency and price discovery as a result of growing index fund investors, we would expect to see an uptick in active money manager performance. Active managers would find the mispriced companies in the index and reap corresponding rewards. But the data shows no improvement, active managers have performed slightly worse over the last three years than before.

Despite the uptick in index and passive investing, price discovery is as strong as it ever has been in the stock market. Michael Burry’s comments on the index bubble are interesting and even sound plausible, but upon close inspection look misguided. Passive investing is still the way to go, though you do have permission to dump those index funds.