3 Aspects of Risk

(Yes, Murray hawked an asset near its top. That's what motivational speakers do. His advice worked out pretty well, though. Although the danger of inflation never materialized, and stocks hit two very rough patches during the Oughts, equities nevertheless are up 80% in real, inflation-adjusted terms since Murray gave that speech. I'm not sure that Murray's stamp trick would have kept the new stock-fund owners in the market during the downturn, but that's another story.)

Bernstein has taken the argument much further, of course. Rather than discussing only purchasing power or--worse yet--engaging in numerology by showing how different assets perform over different time horizons without explaining why, Bernstein has established a framework for categorizing and quantifying the risk of asset destruction. He doesn't go so far as to put a percentage on the possibility of each horseman (happily so, as that would be hubris), but he does argue for the relative probability of each event. He also walks through which assets would fare best under each scenario.

My contribution to this discussion, perhaps, can come with nomenclature. The traditional distinction between risk and volatility is misguided. Per the section below, volatility is very much a risk. Let's make risk the general term, with destruction, volatility, and uncertainty being three of risk's subsets. Risk is the danger that anything unpleasant might occur to a portfolio. Those three items are different types of unpleasantness.

Volatility
That volatility receives short shrift in Bernstein's framework does not indicate that it's to be ignored--quite the contrary. For one, not everybody has the financial means to be an investment adult. Riding out the market's storms requires more than just the mental attributes of investment knowledge and psychological strength. It also requires not being forced into a sale at the wrong time. Volatility is the major risk for assets that will likely be traded over the next few years.

And don't underestimate the mental challenges caused by volatility. Bernstein shows how a wealthy hypothetical U.S. retiree in the early 1930s, holding a seemingly safe 75% stock/25% bond portfolio (the retiree's withdrawal needs were quite modest, thereby affording the relatively aggressive asset mix), would have almost certainly been shocked into selling off stocks near the market bottom. As it turned out, after several devastating years of equity losses, that hypothetical investor could have survived by staying with the original plan. But he realized that only in hindsight. At the time, facing ruin if but one more year were bad, that investor would almost certainly have bailed.

Volatility is a real, present risk. It has, however, received too much attention in recent years. One outcome of the 2008 financial crisis was the emergence of bond managers as mutual fund spokespeople. The star stock-fund manager virtually disappeared from the spotlight replaced by bond managers such as Bill Gross. The new spokespeople, naturally, talk about what their funds do well. They minimize volatility.

Uncertainty
A third aspect of investment risk is uncertainty. Uncertainty takes multiple forms. The simplest species of uncertainty is not knowing when writing a check whether the other party is a crook. As U.S. personality, Will Rogers did not say (but should have), "I'm not as concerned about the return on my money as I am the return of my money." The uncertainty of thievery, fortunately, is virtually unknown to U.S. mutual fund owners, but it affects various other investments, including hedge funds.

There are many portfolio-related uncertainties. There is not knowing who makes the investment decision for a fund, which rather shockingly was a real possibility in the U.S. until the early 1990s, when the SEC mandated that fund companies disclose the names of their funds' portfolio managers, and which is still the reality today in many markets around the world, including Hong Kong There is not knowing what investments the fund has made, which once again affects hedge funds. There are various other forms of not knowing, among them not understanding a fund's investment process or its principal risk, or holding a stock but not understanding the dangers to the company's business. With many industries, which are inherently uncertain, a stock investor cannot avoid such a risk. 

A trickier form of uncertainty is the uncertainty associated with a new asset class, or an untested investment strategy. In their early days, Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities sold at relatively cheap prices because even institutional investors weren't sure how the newfangled instruments would trade if inflation rates changed quickly. The infamous mutual fund category of short-term multimarket funds came and went in a scant five years because their new, complex long-short strategies failed to behave according to expectations.

Almost certainly, investors today are warier of uncertainty than those of decades past. This may be witnessed by the explosive growth of exchange-traded funds, which are notably certain investments. ETFs have full, ongoing portfolio transparency; instant liquidity; and (mostly) simple-to-understand strategies that are coupled with a long track record of index performance. ETFs are in and hedge funds are out; uncertainty is in retreat. 

This discussion of risk can and will bear more attention. One of my Morningstar colleagues has proposed a series of articles that would divide risk into additional categories, and then score how different types of assets and/or mutual funds would rate according to each measure of risk. That's a fine idea. If the framework is strong enough, it might even support the creation of new data points, thereby permitting investors to screen and compare funds on the new risk measures.

"If." More work to be done there. 

John Rekenthaler has been researching the fund industry since 1988. He is now a columnist for Morningstar.com and a member of Morningstar's investment research department. John is quick to point out that while Morningstar typically agrees with the views of the Rekenthaler Report, his views are his own.