First, there really is a viable research program here, and what I’ve tried to show in this brief note is that there really are practical implementations of the Common Knowledge Game that can support investment strategies dealing with story stocks. I want to encourage anyone who’s intrigued by this research program to take the data baton and try this on your favorite stock or mutual fund or index. You can get the FOMC announcement dates straight from the Federal Reserve website. This doesn’t require an advanced degree in econometrics to explore.
I don’t know where this research program ends up, but it’s my commitment to do this in plain sight through Epsilon Theory. Think of it as the equivalent of open source software development, just in the investment world. I suspect it’s hard to turn the Common Knowledge Game into a standalone investment strategy because you’re promising that you’ll do absolutely nothing for 98 out of 100 trading days. Good luck raising money on that. But it’s a great perspective to add to our current standalone strategies, especially actively managed funds. Stock-pickers today are being dealt one dull, low-conviction hand after another here in the Grand Central Bank Casino, and the hardest thing in the world for any smart investor, regardless of strategy, is to sit on his hands and do nothing, even though that’s almost always the right thing to do. Incorporating an awareness of the Common Knowledge Game and its highly punctuated impact makes it easier to do the right thing – usually nothing – in our current investment strategies.
And that gets us to the second take-away from this note. The most important thing to know about any Mysterious Stranger story is that the Stranger is the protagonist. There is no Hero! When you meet a Mysterious Stranger, your goal should be simple: survive the encounter.
This is an insanely difficult perspective to adopt, that we (either individually or collectively) are not the protagonist of the investing age in which we live. It’s difficult because we are creatures of ego. We all star in our own personal movie and we all hear the anthems of our own personal soundtrack. But the Mysterious Stranger is not an obstacle to be heroically overcome, as if we were Liam Neeson setting off (again! and again!) to rescue a kidnapped daughter in yet another “Taken” sequel. At some point this sort of heroism is just a reflection of bad parenting in the case of Liam Neeson, and a reflection of bad investing in the case of stock pickers and other clingers to the correlations and investment meanings of yesterday.
The correlations and investment meanings of today are inextricably entwined with central bankers and their storytelling. To be investment survivors in the low-return and policy-controlled world of the Silver Age of the Central Banker, we need to recognize the impact of their words and incorporate that into our existing investment strategies, while never accepting those words naïvely in our hearts.
Ben Hunt, Ph.D., is the chief risk officer at Salient and the author of Epsilon Theory, a newsletter and website that examines markets through the lenses of game theory and history.