The Half-Happy Horror
June 21, 2019·0 comments
Optimization is a scourge.
I say this as someone who is as addicted to efficiency as anyone I know. I have a chart - not a mental chart, but an actual on-paper chart - of which of the three specific routes I should take to my office by day and time. I almost never schedule same-day meetings because I find it disruptive to planned periods of work on certain projects. I set up a mise en place for making Kraft Mac & Cheese for my kids, for God's sake. My biggest average allocation to public markets in non-taxable accounts for several years has been to risk parity. Much of the rest has sat in systematic trend-following and behavioral premia strategies. I am an optimizer, y'all.
Yet I have also spent my career as an allocator to investment strategies observing what both explicit and implicit goal-seeking does to investors and their processes.
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