Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdmoreira | Hacker News Reader

Of course the market can remain like this for years to come. Improbable but totally possible.

But imagine you are a rational individual and you look at an US centric index that tracks the total market and see that you have been in a 11 year bull market where it rose 300%.

Now you look at the ratio between the total market cap and the GDP (also know as the buffet indicator) and see that it's at historical highs and last time it was at this value was just before the last recession.

Sure... the craziness could go on fuelled by irrational optimism, negative interest rates and the feds printing money like crazy. It could and probably will for a while but is it irrational to be prepared for the potential crash?

View on HN

> It could and probably will for a while but is it irrational to be prepared for the potential crash?

Depends how you are preparing for it. The governments are clearly ready to print as much money as needed to hold up asset prices. They have to, all their pension debt is riding on it, not to mention the politicians political popularity since many voters have large portions of their wealth tied up in these assets.

So when you say prepare for a potential crash, I can only assume that means the dissolution of the government, to the point where the currency is going to be useless. In that scenario, your preparation would be to have a network of resourceful individuals and guns and water and food and fuel.

But I don’t see how cash or treasury bills will prepare anyone.

It’s not merely asset prices, its employment.

> I can only assume that means the dissolution of the government

If I look at historic chart of the market, it goes back to around 1970, because that is the last time that the monetary system failed and needed to be reset.

While I am certainly on board with the idea that the dissolution of governments is possible; there are a wide range of possibilities if the US sacrifices the dollar. Currency collapses happens regularly in the grand scheme of things - but the same can be said about brutal wars.

> If I look at historic chart of the market, it goes back to around 1970, because that is the last time that the monetary system failed and needed to be reset.

What does it mean that the historic chart of the “market” only goes back to 1970?

https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...

One could buy leap otm put options. If there is a crash, they become very valuable. And if they are deep otm, they are not so expensive

On the other hand, I have started doing the opposite: selling short term otm put options. It is the wrong thing to do if there is a big crash, but if it only crashes a little, my options are not affected . Not sure if I should keep doing this.

Sounds like the very definition of “collecting pennies in front of a steam roller.”

No it's the opposite. It's a very low chance at a high payout, a lottery ticket.

Collecting pennies in front of a steamroller is a very high chance at a very low payout (with a small chance of a big loss).

I don't think this is right; you're thinking of buying a put. When you write (sell) a put option you are giving somebody else the right to force you to buy the underlying security at a given price floor. Should the equity fall below that price, you (the seller) are then obligated to spend the extra money over and above the market price to purchase the stock. Otherwise, the buyer won't exercise the option and you keep the fee.

Now I am no options trader, so if I've missed something (very likely) please correct me.

Oh you're right, I misread the second half of that, thought it was buying puts.

I talked about both ways. Either buy the shares and buy an option as insurance, or only sell an option for the "pennies"

In the first case, you can have unlimited profit if the stock goes up, a slight lose if it trades sideways, limited downside no matter how much it drops (or possibly profit, if you have a lot of options)

In the second case, the steamroller is not so bad. If I am forced to buy above the market price when the option gets exercised, that is still below the marker price at the time I sold the option. Thus it is better than the alternative -- buying shares rather than selling the options. Then there is limited upside, limited downside, and a profit if it trades sideways

With "very low chance at a high payout" bets you have to be very careful at various institutional and counterparty risks, as they often are correlated with those "very low chance" events. You may be left holding a winning lottery ticket that lottery organizer can't or won't cover.

PS: Warren has 140 billion sitting in cash right now. He just bought his own stocks because there weren't many opportunities left. The man has been around for 90 years and investing for 80 years. I know we live in a time where youth is glorified and "old people don't understand the world" but I'm pretty sure he learned a thing or two.

“Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble”

He's also a believer in long term investing and can afford moves other investors would shirk from.

How he got his initial money is not a particularly nice story of success...

I think he actually has less opportunities than smaller investors. He complains about that a lot. He is managing a lot of money so he can only buy large cap companies. He frequently claims it's much easier to get a higher returns when you can buy all kinds of companies (big, med and small cap).

> How he got his initial money is not a particularly nice story of success...

Could you expand on this? I'm genuinely curious

Buffett has talked about looking for "elephant" sized acquisitions. Berkshire is so large that it becomes difficult to find good investments of a sufficient size to move the needle. As a smaller investor, I can buy portions of a few $1B market cap companies and make a difference in my portfolio. Buffett, even if he bought such companies outright at a 20% premium, would need to find about 100 of them.

> How he got his initial money is not a particularly nice story of success...

The actual purchase of the failing Berkshire Hathaway textile company perhaps (unless this is about Buffett doing something allegedly unethical)? The textile operation ultimately failed in the mid 1980s, but Buffett was able to, in the meantime, reallocate its cash flows to more promising ventures.

Berkshire Hathaway's market cap is 583 billions though, so it's still 76% invested.

Yes but all those 76% where bought at what he believes were great / reasonable prices. So it's not like he spent 76% of the money at the peak and now has 34% waiting for the bottom.

I see it more like. "here I am with all this cash and there is nothing fairly priced to buy now but soon I might be getting great companies at discount prices".

Doesn't matter. It's equivalent to buying 76% today.

It is only equivalent if the market has infinite liquidity. At 300B, you have execution issue to convert them to cash.

No, it’s not because you will judge how well he does by his ROI and it makes a huge difference at what price he bought.

*24%

If you own the entire company it's easier to weather market downturns. BRK prefers to own the entire company so they can allocate capital to the sectors than need it.

The buffet indicator doesn't hold true with zero interest rates. Even he said at one interview "if thee is unlimited money printing, stocks are extremely cheap right now". People are confused because they input one or two variables in their mindset instead of the true N variables in this complicated system. More of them think "oh, market cycles every ten years and now we have 12 bull? OK so time for dip". No, apparently it doesn't work that way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com