Bulldozer00's Blog

Check out these three financial portfolio performance graphs from Mr. Nassim Taleb:

A fragile portfolio is one which is prone to getting decimated by a rare, unpredictable, event (a.k.a. a Black Swan). A robust portfolio is one which is relatively immune to the effects of a devastating Black Swan. An antifragile portfolio is one which experiences spectacular gains from a Black Swan.

Mr. Taleb asserts that the world’s financial system has been (since the 80’s when we first started bailing out banks), and still is, fragile. As long as bankers know that we, the taxpaying public, will continue to shoulder the cost when they blowup because they are too big too fail, they will continue to exhibit incompetent, reckless, risky behavior backed by bogus PhD calculations. They get their perennial bonuses before each big bust for “doing well“, but aren’t forced to give them back when they lose more money in an instant from a Black Swan than all the profits they’ve ever made previously in the history of banking. It’s a no-brainer with all upside and no downside. What a life… if you don’t have a conscience.

So, how do you construct a anti-fragile portfolio? According to Mr. Taleb, you allocate 80% of your portfolio to “cash” and 20% to wildly speculative investments. It’s called the barbell strategy – weighted investments at both ends of the risk spectrum and nothing in the middle. In the worst case, you’ll lose the full 20%, but the sky is the limit if you’re right with your speculative investment choices. The challenges are:

• To muster up the nerve to actually go against what the mindless “portfolio theory” trained herd says and reallocate your currently fragile portfolio,
• Figure out exactly what Nassim means by “cash” (no, it’s not a savings account at Citibust or Bank Of Nightmerica),
• Decide on which speculative financial instruments to invest in (gold/metals? commodities? real estate? “other”?) .

BD00 knows what these challenges are because, as an unsophisticated investor, he’s struggling to conquer them himself. WTF!