Preston Pysh  04:33

So a good way to synopsize what you just said there would it be you trading the volatility for a short term profit that you’re doing, and it’s something that you don’t mind holding for five years, six years because you know, the intrinsic value of the long term trend is eventually going to save you or pull you out in the event that it just continues to move against you for a long period. Call it three months, four months, or something like that. It’s moving against you. You’re not losing In any sleepover because you’re in it and something that you know is going to have a long term value for yourself.

Jack Schwager  05:05

Yeah, it has to be like the type of thing where you say, “I’ll hold it to zero” type thing. Yeah, but you don’t do that. You only do that for a small portion. You know, you don’t put all your money in something like that, but you can do that selectively. You do it with things which have, why… Why isn’t he doing that with ETFs because they’re multiple stocks? So yeah, I mean, you could pick a mining stock, and it can go broke for whatever reason. I mean, all of us. But if you buy a basket of stocks for an ETF, it’s not exposed to that.

Before, there’s a very interesting question about using the fundamentals of trading. This is a point. I never hear anybody else make this that I have put into my own books, but I think it’s true. And when it comes to fundamentals, the way fundamentals are most useful to trading now, not investing, I believe people can use fundamentals to invest and the example I gave is maybe like a way you could use it right. But for trading, we’re taking more of an in-out you know, more leverage type position, There, the value of fundamentals is not with the fundamentals. It is fundamentals where the market acts opposite to the fundamentals. So it’s a contrarian use of fundamentals. So it’s a matter of fundamental news that comes out, it should have the market going up, and the market barely budges or it goes down.

Preston Pysh  06:27

So let’s just talk about the current conditions right now. So we’re on April 24, 2016. You’re seeing all these companies who missed their earnings. Earnings are just going through the floor for all these companies. You make the argument that the fundamentals are bad,. You would think the multiples would trade lower, and the market screams back to almost its highs that it’s been seeing. So in that situation, everyone can relate to that because everyone’s seeing that in their account right now. Talk to us about your example so that we can apply…

Jack Schwager  06:58

A traders’ perspective would be that, hey, you know, *inaudible is coming out, the stock should go down. It’s going up. So it’s not like, what an investor’s perspective, or what may be a novice investors’ perspective would be, “Hey, the stocks going up in the news is bad. It’s even a better sell.” Something like that. But a traders’ standpoint is, “Gey, this stock looks like it’s high. News has come out, it should have gone down, it’s going up. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t care what’s going on the market is telling me it’s going up.” So it’s one fundamental to the opposite of what’s expected. That’s important from a trading perspective.

Stig Brodersen  07:41

Yeah, I think it’s a great example, Jack. And if I could just come up with a  simple example. So whenever I was… I think I’ve mentioned this a few times on the podcast, but I used to be a commodities trader. I would be one of those doing like 500 trades a day, which seems strange since I’m oil trading because I did like one trade eight months ago.

But when I was trading I was looking at the weather. So I was a power trader. I was looking at the price of electricity and given how much demand and how much supply coming out in the market, there was a given price that the market believed would be the correct price. So I would be sitting and look at the fundamentals of looking at the weather and say, “Okay, if there was more wind coming in, that means there’s more supply, which means that everything else equal, the price should go down.”

What Jack is saying is that there was a variety of different ways. But really, it’s just a question of: what does the market expect in the short run and what is happening? And you can do that with fundamentals, even though it sounds strange to a value investor that you do have fundamentals within an hour or two hours.

Jack Schwager  08:43

In most cases, fundamentals ultimately determine market direction. Obviously, markets will just go up or down for no reason. But they can take a long time and fundamentals work but they work broadly. They’re very blunt instruments. They can’t be used for timing. They can be used as for investors, they can be used for taking positions on *inaudible. So I’ve put that like, that’s how it can be used. But they can’t be used for saying, “Oh, here’s fundamental news. It’s bullish, that means I should buy it.” That doesn’t work unless it’s a complete surprise, in which case, then the market may respond to the direction.

But then, of course, those parts so quickly, you can’t take advantage of it immediately. But the thing is, in most cases, the real value, if you’re going to use them for timing, it’s in a contrarian fashion. That’s the main point I’m trying to make. If you use them from investing, use it the logical way so to speak, if you use them for trading, you use them of a contrarian.

Preston Pysh  09:38

So jack, I was going to ask you a question right now about Edward Thorp that we already talked about Edward and the first question. So what I’m going to do is just  amend this a little bit. And two people, two billionaires that we talked about on our show a lot are Stanley Druckenmiller and Ray Dalio, and you’ve interviewed both of these guys. Which one of those two guys would you rather talk about during this question that you found maybe a little bit more interesting than the other or that you think might have a little bit more of an interesting discussion?

Jack Schwager  10:05

But is there a particular question about them?

Preston Pysh  10:08

Yeah, because I’m going to tailor the question more towards your…

Jack Schwager  10:11

Okay, give me the question and I’ll pick which one.

Preston Pysh  10:13

All right, well, then let’s talk about Dalio’s risk parity. I know that when your interview hinted at the idea that he said, “This one thing is the holy grail of investing.” And I would like for you to  talk to our audience about that interview with Ray Dalio, where it took place,  like what it was like in his office, what his personality was like. And then a little bit about risk parity and this holy grail to investing.

Jack Schwager  10:38

Well, the Bridgewater is this huge hedge fund, but more with 1000 people. So their large office complex in Connecticut, and Dalio’s office, in particular, it’s a nice bucolic Connecticut setting. There’s like a stream outside and it’s a nice vibe to it. Dalio himself was a terse guy, I would say. I don’t know if he’s like that to everybody, but he did give an interview when we did it to me twice. But it was like I was scheduled. I was scheduled for one interview and another interview, and the time was up. He may have said “time is up” in the second interview.

Preston Pysh  11:14

Yeah, I think I remember reading that.

Jack Schwager  11:16

I was like, Okay, that’s it. You got it. That’s all. That’s all folks. That was Dalio.

Druckenmiller, in contrast, which I used to interview Druckenmiller in his New York apartment on some weekend afternoon. He went on for hours and hours and he had a lot of stories. It was a long, much longer interview. Although Druckenmiller, I did in one whole sitting. In Dalio’s case, I did it in two, but I still spent more time with Druckenmiller.

What Dalio is talking about the real edge of *inaudible, the real key and I think it’s what you’re referring to, is the power of diversification and that if you take a single investment, you have a certain amount of return to risk built-in. If you took a lot of equivalent investment, but that were not correlated, or at least partially uncorrelated, you still get the same return which he drew like this curve, which shows the risk coming down as you add, you know, more investments. And so that’s a critical part of it is this diversification element. And that’s absolutely true. I don’t think that’s particularly unique. I think a lot of people understand that. But it is very core to his whole thinking. And mathematically, it is true mathematically. It is absolutely true. That’s why for example, you could take a multi-manager fund. And if you pick a manager about equivalent, you have a much better product with multi-manager fund fees aside that.

But just go straight to the investment point, because if they’re all about equivalent, then the return level should be affected but your risk goes way down. So that diversification concept is in fact what the line I probably use myself and I don’t know if it’s probably not original to me, but I mean, it’s a common line is diversification is the only free lunch on Wall Street.

Preston Pysh  13:14

I got a quick follow up question because on our show we’ve we had Jim Rickards, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Jim Rickards, but we had him on our show just recently. And Jim us pushing gold hard. A lot of people in our audience are listening to that interview and reading a little bit more about gold and we know Stanley Druckenmiller took an enormous position in gold. I want to say, what is it, Stig? 20% or 25% of his whole portfolio is in gold right now?

Stig Brodersen  13:40

Yeah, it’s significant. And he also talks about Kyle Bass. It’s interesting all these billionaires go into gold right now.

Preston Pysh  13:46

So this is a question more to you, Jack because I know you’re a futures guy. I know you dig into this stuff. What’s your opinion on gold in the next year to three?

Jack Schwager  13:56

Okay, so that opinion is based on a technical reading, but I would see people that studies on gold, right? They say, well, gold production, a breakdown production, and they have gold consumption and jewelry and all this. And, you know, I thought to myself, if you look at the numbers, gold is one of these markets where there’s never a shortage, it can never be a shortage of gold. Why? Because gold gets mined to get stored. And there are about 100 times as much gold as used in any given year.

All this writing and stuff that goes on about the fundamentals or so-called fundamentals of gold, about what’s being produced and what’s used, it’s nonsense. It’s like 1% of 100 it makes absolutely no difference. Gold is determined by one thing: psychology. It’s a pure psychological market that’s in pure psychology. Now, the psychology can be affected by inflation expectations into relative interest rate levels, currency fluctuations. Those are the types of things that affect gold. The tricky part is they use some of these things usually picked up the same way but in some cases not. So it’s not as simple as just saying, “Well, you know, gold will always go up, if there are inflationary expectations.” Well, it usually will but not always.

But in any case, it is purely a psychological market. Now, I think it’s pretty hard to trade something on trying to anticipate psychology. My opinion is you get the psychology by looking at charts. And in the case of gold, what you have in the charts is a very strong bullish pattern on a long term basis, because what gold did is it had this bear move. And after a large bear move, it went into this rounding bottom. And that grounding type of pattern doesn’t occur that often. It occurs every now and then.

But usually when you get a rounding pattern in markets, either bottom or top, and then the market goes, like you get a saucer and it pops out of the saucer. It keeps on going and maintains that that usually is a long term bottom. And so if I had to guess, if you said, “Hey, here’s $100,000 you’re going to have to put, you have to belong or short, you know, you got to pick one and you got to hold it. You have to hold it for two years, three years, you can’t do anything at all. If you’re long or short you have to hold it.” Definitely, I would go long even though it’s gone straight up for recently.

Stig Brodersen  16:15

So, Jack, it is always interesting for Preston and me to be able to grow our knowledge with our guests. That’s something you’d value and we do the same thing from our audience. We talked about not shorting Japanese yen, the whole thing about independence, and having your own strategy and we think that’s a super important thing that goes all three of us but also uses other people to grow on knowledge.

Jack, I know that you recently founded FundSeeder. Could you please explain how you implement the inputs from the community in your own strategy?

Jack Schwager  16:47

Okay, so first I have to tell people, most of the audience will not fancy this new… So I’m sure the vast majority of the audience will not know about it. So FundSeeder is not my original idea. I can’t take credit there. There’s a partner in the firm and the founding partner, Emanuel Balarie. We have another partner, Jason *inaudible. But he had the idea of using the web as a central source, where you could bring together traders worldwide who have the trading skill but are totally unknown, and have no way of accessing capital and act as a connecting, as a connection between them. And investors who are looking for new trading talent and don’t want to invest, say, multi-billion-dollar managers, everybody else is investing with.

So that was his basic concept and the idea was to create a website where traders could post their numbers, not by themselves posted but they could link their accounts to the website. Therefore, the numbers get verified from the broker. So you create a verified trader base of traders all over the world, not because we’re saints or anything like that. Our self-interest is if we can attract unknown or known but good traders to the site, then we will be able to find them before anybody else does.

18:09

And then we have a separate company called FundSeeder Investments that will use the database that we form on FundSeeder either to select superior traders we find then package them in individual funds or multi-manager products and use that product for investors. So that’s the basic model. So we act as the connecting link through two separate companies. The FundSeeder technologies attract traders and get verified track records. And then the FundSeeder Investments uses that intelligence to form a superior and completely different product.

Stig Brodersen  18:40

So Jack, whenever I hear something about measuring the performance of portfolios, I always think it’s an interesting conversation because it’s hard to find the right answer to how do you measure who’s doing well? I mean, it’s also a question of how much risk are you assuming so can I ask you because you’ve spoken to so many traders and so many investors, how do you measure portfolio performance?

Jack Schwager  19:02

I have my own favorite single measure favorite because I think it is one number that captures the essence of return and risk. And it’s much better I think than a lot of other things. Everybody uses the Sharpe ratio, right. That’s a popular thing. That is nothing wrong with the Sharpe ratios. However, there are a couple of drawbacks to the Sharpe ratio, but maybe the biggest drawback of the Sharpe ratio is how it defines risk.

The Sharpe ratio says when you have your return divided by the risk. What’s risk? Risk is volatility. Now, here’s the interesting thing. Sometimes high volatility is indicative of high risk, but it’s not always the case. You could actually… I can give you examples where low volatility is indicative of high risk. And the other part of that is that high volatility is not necessarily bad. Traders don’t mind high volatility. I’m not trading investors. Investors don’t mind high volatility, they mind losses. You know, I’ve been in this business for a long time, I’ve never had investors to say to me, “Oh, you made 10% plasma, I can’t stand that type of volatility.” Investors don’t mind volatility.

They don’t like downside volatility. So if you’re trying to measure what risk is the way investors perceive it, why use volatility, asymmetrical volatility measure, which is penalizing strong returns, and then you penalize good managers, who will sometimes have very large gains because they hit it right. Like we’re talking about Greenblatt with that Wells Fargo trade, but he’s structured a trade where if he’s wrong, he loses a little bit. And if he’s right, he makes a lot. So you’re going to penalize it because he’s made a lot?

Stig Brodersen  20:50

Yeah. So, Jack, my question would be to say that I would be trading out what I would want to raise money because I’m doing the best trades, and I can show as a real good traction record. So if I was a trader who comes to you and says, “Okay, Jack, you need to fund me or I need to find someone who can fund me, because I have a great track record.” But you look at the Sortino ratios is that it, which is just the maximum drawdown in a given month or given time period. Is that a better measure giving you a critique of the Sharpe ratio? Or what do you think?

Jack Schwager  21:19

Yeah, the Sortino ratio is definitely much better. And what I personally use is something I called a gain to pain ratio, which is conceptually much closer to the Sortino. Obviously, sharp and again to pain ratio, and Sortino will have a lot, perhaps a reasonable amount of correlation. I like the gain to pain because it’s really simple, and it boils things down to its absolute core. So with the gain to pain defines the people and I guess it’s my own measure.

There are some things out there like the Omega function, which is a curve, which evaluated at zero level, will give you the same ranking but as a single statistic, the gain to pain ratio, as far as I know, I was the first one to started writing about it or using it.

So what a gain to pain ratio is you take all the monthly returns, and you sum them. And then you take only the monthly losses, and you sum those. And then you take the first sum, which is the sum of all the gains. So all the total amount of money made, that’s net, because you’ve got, you’re making so much losing, it’s not much. But if you add all the months’ returns, which you get is the sum of all the returns you’ve made. And then you divide it by the absolute value of all the losses. So what you’re getting is the amount of monetary gain for the amount of losses suffered during that period. So the more losing months there are, you know, the more the bigger that denominator will be. The larger the losing months are, the bigger it will be.

So you’re penalized exactly what you want to penalize. You’re penalizing multiple losing months, you’re penalizing larger losing months, and you’re differentiating a track record where the gains are made without a lot of losing months, without big losing months. So basically, that’s the concept. It’s the amount that. it’s a total of all returns divided by the total of all the losses, the absolute value of that. That’s the ratio.

So you can have managers who are riskier than you realize. For example, you got a manager, you look at his track record, and he’s got a, let’s say, you got a 5% down month say, “Well, that is 5% that’s not too bad.” But hey, all you know that magic could have been down, 25% just vanished to come back, and then up, down 5% if you have daily numbers, there’s no place to hide. So if you do, a gain to pain ratio of all the days, all the days, add them up, you take all the losing days, add them up, you take that ratio, that gives you a microscopic look. And it tells you everything. It gives you a positive thing for the return. It gives you the negative thing for every single daily loss that occurred. And that ratio is a powerful number. Very simple, powerful number. So that’s what I personally use. In my mind, it’s the single best, most effective and meaningful, and easy to calculate statistics. That’s my favorite statistic.

Preston Pysh  23:57

That’d be neat to see that graphed. If you could take that daily snapshot and graph the performance over time… Oh, is it? Yeah.

Jack Schwager  24:06

Yeah, that’s the main thing it does. In fact, I like it because as a trader, you can put your equity, you could look at your equity curve, it’s nice to be able to see your equity curve. You can see when you’re starting to go down or whatever. And so that’s one of the things and brokerage companies, as far as I know, they don’t offer that. Yeah, they probably don’t offer it for good reason because if people start to see their equity curve that goes out, if I close their accounts. I’m just guessing here, I’m not accusing anybody.

Preston Pysh  24:30

Well, I’ll tell you what I know, there’s going to be a lot of people in our audience that are interested in checking this out. So if you are interested in going to a Jack site here that has all this service, please go to our show notes. We’re going to have a link there. So just in the event that you forget the name or whatever, just go to our website, go into our show notes. We’re going to have that in there. We’re going to have all of Jack’s books. And let me tell you, as a person who’s read multiple of these books, they are just fantastic. And Stig I know can attest and if you guys go back, we did a podcast episode. I don’t remember what the episode number was, but we did a podcast episode on Hedge Fund Market Wizards. And we just love that book. And this is before we knew Jack and before we had Jack on the show, and everyone knows that we’re pretty honest with our reviews. If we don’t like the book, we’re pretty upfront and honest about it. So we enjoyed all the books that you’ve written, Jack, and we definitely want the people in our audience, if you haven’t read any of Jack’s books, you are going to love them. So we’re going to have a link to all of his books on Amazon in the show notes.

Is there anything else, Jack, that you’d like to hand off to our audience that they can learn more about your website or anything like that?

Jack Schwager  25:35

Well, like the main one is fundseeder.com I also have another website jackschwager.com. I would also throw out that there are narrated versions of the Market Wizard books, audio versions, and I’m currently the first time I’ve had the opportunity to pick the narrator. And so one of my Market Wizard books in the market was never had the narration done. My agent was great at getting the rights for me. So I went through a process of picking narrators through ACX, which is connected via Audible, and they’ve got just phenomenal narratives. And I was floored as I got like, I put up a couple of excerpts and I got like 40 people respond. They were all good. There’s so many great, I got it down to 10 and got it down to four. And I got it down to one and the guy is just, dude. He’s just a knockout chop. So this is the best narration of any book I’ve had of mine, which is coming out in about a month and that’ll be the new marker with this fellow’s name is TJ Hall.

Preston Pysh  26:28

Well, so one of the things that we offer. So we have a deal with Audibles, Jack, through our website. If people go to our onto our website, and they use our link for Audibles, they can download their very first audiobook for free using our link. So you might want to even hold off if you want to get your free book or you want to buy it when it comes out in May. It’s up to you, but we’ll have a link to the Audibles link if people want to do that and get their first book for free. We’ll have all of the links to Jack’s book.

Jack, thank you for your time. I know that you’ve got a very busy schedule, you do countless things. So to take some time out of your weekend to sit down and chat with Stig and me for an hour and 20 minutes. We are just so thankful and appreciative. And I know our audience is going to benefit from this greatly. So thank you.

Jack Schwager  27:10

This was fun because you guys went into a lot of different types of questions. It gets so tired of getting the same questions all the time. So it’s nice to get some from the left field.

Preston Pysh  27:21

Well, thank you for your time, Jack.

Hey, so I want to take this moment just to make a quick announcement to everyone in the audience. So one of the things that Stig and I want to start doing is doing more live events all over the world. So for example, on June 11, we’re going to have an event in Seoul, South Korea. So anybody listening to our show from Asia that’s out near South Korea if you want to link up with us for a free dinner event on the 11th of June and this is coming up in 2016 in Seoul, South Korea. We’re going to have a signup location on our website at TheInvestorsPodcast.com calm where you can go in there, you just click on a link, you give us our email address, and then we’ll provide you more information about the event. And it doesn’t cost anything to sign up or just, you pay for your dinner. And that’s it, and you guys get to meet us and hang out.

So for the one in Seoul, South Korea, it’s just going to be me. Stig’s not going to be able to make that one. But we have other events. And if you’re interested in doing this, just go to our website and go to this page, you’ll see it at the very top of our homepage. It’s in the drop-down menu, and then also, where we have our priorities for the show, we have a thing where we have 123. And then number three, it says, “link up with us for a live event” and that’s where you’d sign up for this. So just a heads up. So on the 16th of July 2016, we’re going to be in Huntsville, Alabama. So if you live in Atlanta, Nashville, or anywhere down in that area, feel free to come out. These are all on Saturday nights. And then in Baltimore, Maryland on the 24th of September. There’s another event. So if any of those are in your neck of the woods or in your neighborhood, feel free to go to our website, sign up for those and then we can hang out for a night. So I want to make that announcement. We’re going to have a lot more of these coming up in the future. So just stay tuned and keep looking at the tab to see if we’re coming to a town near you.

Outro  29:17

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