While future articles will return to focusing on the option Greeks, a recent comment regarding risk really piqued my interest - the age old discussion about risk versus reward, equities versus options, and the fundamental difference between Nassim Taleb's "Black Swan" risk and what most people perceive as ordinary risk.
In a perfect world, financial markets are by design a discounting mechanism of a cash flow stream, risk versus reward, and a psychological environment where the difference between profits and losses is merely perception. In the end, trading is all about the mastery of risk mitigation and leveraging probability.
I am an options trader, not because I do not like equities or futures, but because I fear the perception of their so-called safety. Most academics and the average investor believe that financial markets, and specifically individual stocks, follow a Gaussian, or log normal distribution. While various economists and statisticians have argued this point for decades, understand that price distributions are in fact not strictly Gaussian.
Price distributions are capable of exhibiting more than the predicted occasions of price inhabiting the extreme regions of the distribution curve. Understanding these concepts is critical in order to have a robust understanding of risk. This type of phenomenon is called "fat tail" risk; statisticians refer to it as leptokurtosis. It is this degree of risk well beyond the normally distributed range to which Taleb has characterized as "Black Swan" risk.
In financial markets, having accepted that these fat tails do in fact exist and exist with a frequency far beyond what is intuitively apparent, risk becomes significantly harder to quantify. When risk becomes more difficult to quantify it can be said that investors and traders have significantly more exposure to a catastrophic event than they realize.
In basic terms, the financial world we live in today is wrought with fat tails. Government integration and manipulation of financial markets, the Federal Reserve's (supposedly independent) direct engagement into the bond market - and specifically treasuries and mortgage backed securities - creates an environment in those markets where distributions are not statistically normalized. Geopolitical risk, such as the potential for an Israeli air strike against Iran, places unconditional risk on a variety of risk assets - at the forefront light sweet crude oil.
If one considers all the various risks extant, risk today seems excruciatingly high. Professors on Minyanville have recently called into question whether paper assets like the Gold ETF GLD is accurately priced. It is widely believed that there is significantly less physical gold versus gold-backed paper. This adds yet another element of uncertainty to an increasingly uncertain environment.
What would happen to the gold ETF GLD if an analyst announced that the GLD ETF no longer had access to physical gold? What would happen to the valuation? How can they maintain adequate capital levels inside the ETF if gold demand rises while physical supply diminishes? The answer is contraction in the NAV price of the gold ETF. In real terms, the ETF owns less gold than the paper supposedly represents and price must come down to indicate this discrepancy. Make no mistake, the market will be happy to provide the swift and unforgiving necessity of adjusting to parity.
While the above offers basic examples of fat tails, the increased statistical variation has a name. The name of this type of condition where fat tails surround us and atypical logarithmic distribution takes place is called kurtosis. As a side note, since recent and forthcoming articles are going to focus on the Greeks, kurtosis comes from the Greek word meaning
