Nero's Risk Aversion: Shooting for Longevity

Modus Operandi

A word on Nero’s methods. He is as conservative a trader as one can be in such a business. In the past he has had good years and less than good years—but virtually no truly “bad” years. Over these years he has slowly built for himself a stable nest egg, thanks to an income ranging between $300,000 and (at the peak) $2.5 million. On average, he manages to accumulate $500,000 a year in after-tax money (from an average income of about $1 million); this goes straight into his savings account. In 1993, he had a bad year and was made to feel uncomfortable in his company. Other traders made out much better, so the capital at his disposal was severely reduced, and he was made to feel undesirable at the institution. He then went to get an identical job, down to an identically designed workspace, but in a different firm that was friendlier. In the fall of 1994 the traders who had been competing for the great performance award blew up in unison during the worldwide bond market crash that resulted from the random tightening by the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. They are all currently out of the market, performing a variety of tasks. This business has a high mortality rate.

Why isn’t Nero more affluent? Because of his trading style—or perhaps his personality. His risk aversion is extreme. Nero’s objective is not to maximize his profits, so much as it is to avoid having this entertaining machine called trading taken away from him. Blowing up would mean returning to the tedium of the university or the nontrading life. Every time his risks increase, he conjures up the image of the quiet hallway at the university, the long mornings at his desk spent in revising a paper, kept awake by bad coffee. No, he does not want to have to face the solemn university library where he was bored to tears. “I am shooting for longevity,” he is wont to say.

Nero has seen many traders blow up, and does not want to get into that situation. Blow up in the lingo has a precise meaning; it does not just mean to lose money; it means to lose more money than one ever expected, to the point of being thrown out of the business (the equivalent of a doctor losing his license to practice or a lawyer being disbarred). Nero rapidly exits trades after a predetermined loss. He never sells “naked options” (a strategy that would leave him exposed to large possible losses). He never puts himself in a situation where he can lose more than, say, $1 million—regardless of the probability of such an event. That amount has always been variable; it depends on his accumulated profits for the year. This risk aversion prevented him from making as much money as the other traders on Wall Street who are often called “Masters of the Universe.” The firms he has worked for generally allocate more money to traders with a different style from Nero.

Nero’s temperament is such that he does not mind losing small change. “I love taking small losses,” he says. “I just need my winners to be large.” In no circumstances does he want to be exposed to those rare events, like panics and sudden crashes, that wipe a trader out in a flash. To the contrary, he wants to benefit from them. When people ask him why he does not hold on to losers, he invariably answers that he was trained by “the most chicken of them all,” the Chicago trader Stevo who taught him the business. This is not true; the real reason is his training in probability and his innate skepticism.

There is another reason why Nero is not as rich as others in his situation. His skepticism does not allow him to invest any of his own funds outside of treasury bonds. He therefore missed out on the great bull market. The reason he offers is that it could have turned out to be a bear market and a trap. Nero harbors a deep suspicion that the stock market is some form of an investment scam and cannot bring himself to own a stock. The difference with people around him who were enriched by the stock market was that he was cash-flow rich, but his assets did not inflate at all along with the rest of the world (his treasury bonds hardly changed in value). He contrasts himself with one of those start-up technology companies that were massively cash-flow negative, but for which the hordes developed some infatuation. This allowed the owners to become rich from their stock valuation, and thus dependent on the randomness of the market’s election of the winner. The difference with his friends of the investing variety is that he did not depend on the bull market, and, accordingly, does not have to worry about a bear market at all. His net worth is not a function of the investment of his savings—he does not want to depend on his investments, but on his cash earnings, for his enrichment. Nero treats government bonds as the conservative home for his savings. That preference avoids his exposure to stock-market declines, but it does not eliminate every risk: bond prices and the purchasing power of repayments can change. The ability of a government to issue currency is not a guarantee that an investor faces no loss.