The bear market is turning me into a bad person

3 month average of S&P 500

I ran across this article reinterpreting strategist Peter Berezin’s comments regarding the market.

Instead of the predictions, or him being right, or the definitely-going-to-be-misinterpreted suggestions on how to mitigate it, I was struck by how level-headed and egoless Peter Berezin seems to be. Here are some examples:

  • A couple months before the peak he predicted US stocks would fall because of a trade-war caused recession (the recession hasn’t happened officially yet, but the rest is true). His reaction is that he could be just as easily be proven wrong tomorrow about something he analyzes.
  • As the market was peaking just after he made his prediction, instead of saying he was confident he was going to be proven right, he said, “You always have to question your assumptions. If you don’t, you’re not really doing your job properly.”
  • As to why the consensus was wrong, he had two observations: people had been wrong the other way in 2017 and they were giving Trump the (now mistaken) benefit of the doubt, and that as a strategist for a research firm, it isn’t a career-ender to make an incorrect bearish prediction that it would have been when he was an economist for a bank.

Even his predictions going forward have a light, humble touch:

  • He is only targeting 12% more drawdown from the high. This would effectively be just a return to historical averages. Soft-landing territory. If there is an actual crash, it’d be much worse.
  • He explains in a common-sense way how Trump thinks which explains how the market got here as well as why it’s unlikely to reverse course.
  • He points out that the traditional mitigations or reactions (“buying the dip” and “hiding in bonds”) are unlikely to work like they have in the past.

After showing this to M—, she mentioned that Warren Buffet is the only one of the richest people in the world who made money this year.

As the Oracle of Omaha has a similar disposition as Mr Berezin, I can assume even Warren Buffet is thinking he’s likely be in the red by the time the year is out, maybe not as bad as the others. For, as he famously said, “You don’t find out who’s been swimming naked until the tide goes out.”

(I must confess, I might have some schadenfreude if or when those margin calls happen. In the meantime, I need to work on becoming a better person like these two.)

Posted on by tychay 0

My first dice were the wrong color

At work, I mentioned my first dice I ever had were the “wrong color” because the Basic D&D set I had, had a chit card, instead of dice. I cut up the card and put them in Silo cups labeled with the die roll.

This got me down a rabbit hole on why they were they were called Holmes dice, why they were the wrong color, and the deal with chits. I found out that it was called Holmes because J Eric Holmes was tasked with slimming down OD&D rules for this set and my copy included chits because of this article explaining why.

(Note that there were two errors in the article, even though it is recounted by Jim Ward himself. First, I’m pretty sure the print runs back then were about 10,000 copies in size, not 100,000. Second, he’s off by one year as this occurred in 1979-1980, not after 1980. I’m sure of the second, because I received my Basic D&D set for Christmas in 1979 and it didn’t have “dice and a crayon.”)

So, even though I have most of my first dice set (wrong color, different manufacturer, missing 6-sider since it didn’t come with it), I decided to get a replica Holmes set that I saw on sale on Amazon which came out last year for the 50th anniversary (of D&D).

While I understood that the replica would have much better plastic than the nylon (or whatever) in the original set, I was actually disappointed in the set because of two deal-killers in my mind. First, the 20-sider die is numbered 1-20 instead of 0-9 twice. The 4-sided die had the numbers on the top facing outward instead of on the edges facing inward.

Oh well, as luck would have it, I’m cleaning up my garage which is full of my stuff from my old storage unit and I ran across my Gamma World box set which has a set of Holmes dice in it. There was an extra 20-sider in there but it was missing the 4-sider. Gamma World is odd because later TSR box sets used a percentile system (Boot Hill, Top Secret, and Gang Busters) and game with 2 10 siders in different colors (Later D&D’s came with monocular dice and a crayon.) This is because Gamma World is based on Metamorphosis Alpha, the first SciFi RPG. It’s possible I lost the 4-sider, but more likely — because I don’t remember owning a yellow 4-sider, only a red one — TSR didn’t include a 4-sider in order to include an extra 20-sider for percentile rolls.

In any case, since I’m not going to use these dice anyway, I decided to take the “modern inspired” set out and store them separately and put the 4 actual Holmes dice I do own in there.