Risk Seeking

  

Categories: Trading

See: Risk Lover. See: Risk of Ruin.

You were cautious juuuust before the 2008/9 mortgage crisis crash tthat almost ended the Western World. You were not risk-seeking then, as you converted most of your long equity positions into cash or bought long-lead puts against them to hedge your positions. But in mid-2009, when it became clear that the world was not, in fact, ending, you changed your tune. To risk-seeking rather than risk-avoiding.

So you margined as much of your portfolio as you could, and went levered-long to risk. As the markets went up and recovered from the brutal beating they'd taken, you were amply rewarded for having sought out risk, i.e. invested in the most fragile companies, those staring bankruptcy in the gaping maw. The companies leveraged 5:1 debt-to-EBITDA. So when they recovered and went from 4x EBITDA to 12x, with leverage, you made 30-50 times your money in just a half decade.

Yeah, that math works. Good work if you can get it. And have the Brunswicks to pull it off.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is market risk?5 Views

00:00

Finance Allah shmoop what is market risk All right There

00:08

are a lot of risks when you invest money Two

00:10

of the most common categories are unsystematic risk And yes

00:13

of course systematic risk Also known as market risk Well

00:17

unsystematic risk refers to risks linked to a specific stock

00:21

or security So you buy shares in your dad's publicly

00:24

traded ice cream company and the company goes bankrupt Who

00:27

knew pork rind ice cream would prove so unpopular Who

00:30

knew well that's unsystematic risk You made a bad investment

00:34

and you paid for it by losing everything you invested

00:38

un systematically Well that's individual stock risk or in systematic

00:42

risk AII bad brain bad return What not all investments

00:45

do well In fact many of them do poorly even

00:47

for the best of investors So most professionals diversify their

00:50

eggs such that not all of them are invested in

00:53

one stock or one basket So that revolves around unsystematic

00:57

risk That is risk You can actually do something about

01:00

and improve your odds of being successful like by being

01:03

a good smart investor But then there's market risk which

01:07

just exists as a natural part of the risk world

01:10

For illustrative purposes You could choose to not take any

01:13

road risk Like when you drive on the roads Your

01:16

odds of being hit by some idiot texting his girlfriend

01:19

and not looking at the double yellow line are not

01:21

one in a good Gillian right You also have a

01:23

risk of a tire blowout or a tree falling on

01:26

you or skidding into a mailbox on that hill with

01:28

the gravel in the oil slick from the construction people

01:32

right Those are all quote market risks unquote of driving

01:35

So why do it Why drive Why not just stay

01:38

home Never leave the house get Amazon and door dash

01:41

and ups to take care of all of your needs

01:43

and never suffer the market risk of dying on the

01:46

road Well for some people this probably is a good

01:49

idea Well the same allegory lives in the stock market

01:52

When you invest in stocks odds are extremely high that

01:56

at some period while their value will go down maybe

01:58

a lot You can't head yourself against things like terrorist

02:01

attacks and natural disasters political upheaval and zombie apocalypses or

02:06

apocalypse side They say The zombie There's no real way

02:09

to protect yourself against market risk It's just systematic It's

02:13

part of the system Got it So there's no way

02:15

to deal with market risk other than for one thing

02:18

time Historically the stock market goes up over time Check

02:23

out this glorious chart running for one hundred years in

02:25

change for what the market is done without even calculating

02:28

the additional return from dividends distributed along the way Well

02:31

you can see that there has rarely been an extended

02:33

period of time when the market didn't go up and

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or at least distribute enough in dividends Such that in

02:38

each decade while there's been a nicely positive return from

02:42

being invested in the stock market could this suddenly change

02:46

and go the other direction such that we have half

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a century of no growth Sure but that would be

02:51

a big departure from the way our driving has gone

02:53

in the past on the roads But you never know

02:56

There's always the N plus one idiot out there texting

02:59

and driving and you know really not giving a

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