职业赌徒给投资者的3大启示

    所有投资者都可以从职业赌徒身上学习三点重要的经验。

    这是本周我重返学校学到的一件事。坐落于威斯康辛大学麦迪逊分校（University of Wisconsin-Madison）的威斯康辛商学院（Wisconsin School of Business）设有一个商业记者交流项目。每个学期，他们都会邀请一位商业记者到访，待上几天，与教授们面对面讨论他们的研究项目，参观学院设施，与学生们座谈，讨论他们手头的工作。

    有一点需要声明，11岁以前我一直生活在麦迪逊。人们告诉我，我的父亲查克•谢尔曼当时是一位摇滚明星传播学教授。但我已经有近30年没有回到这里了。我对于该商学院的现状一无所知。这种模式很有意思：学生们会在10个“知识中心”中选择其中1个专攻，其中包括营销研究、品牌管理以及我每天一早都要看的证券分析。授课老师既有学术界人士，也有在相关领域从业多年的专业人士。

    关于投资者和赌徒的妙论就出自金融系主任马克•瑞迪。这一点让他的同事布莱恩•海尔默，一位曾经的投资组合经理、如今的Hawk应用证券分析中心主任多少感到有些尴尬。“我们不是想强化投资的赌博心理，”他说。（因此，他也不认为股市赌博属于金融文明范畴。）但继续深入探讨，他和瑞迪都认同一点，事实上有些东西确实能帮助投资者（不是日内交易员，不是短线炒作者,而是那些希望藉此就能退休的投资者们）改善投资表现。

    1.它有助于理解概率。换言之，瑞迪表示，加深对概率的理解能给投资者带来好处。太多人无法区分运气成份和随机性。“他们的解读是无中生有。”最常见的例子：短期价格变动。“里面有太多噪音，”他说。“你可能有非常完善的（投资）流程，但还是做不对。”他指出：做对一次与做错一次，没什么区别。前者不能让你成为一个天才，而后者也不会让你成为一个白痴。真正重要的是总体的个人投资纪录。

    2.关注异常值。海尔默表示，大多数投资者对此不够关注。他说，一位职业足球赌客的大部分时间会用来考虑押注在哪一场比赛，而不是分析在特定周日每一场比赛中押注多少。为什么这样做？“大多数赔率的设置都是正确的，大多数赌局的定价都是正确的。你要找的是定价不准确的少数赌局。”优秀投资者也从同样的努力中得到了好处：利用一只股票（或市场）针对坏消息甚至是坏消息的基调作出的过度反应。

    3.不能根据一、两个结果就改变自己的策略。计算纸牌的赌徒如何能赌赢赌场？不是每一手都赢，瑞迪解释说，而是总的加起来赢多输少。经常能跑赢大盘的投资者也是一样。你可以闭上眼睛，无视每天、每周、甚至每月的波动，专注于长期表现。海尔默称，这一点很难做到，就算对于那些高净值个人而言也是如此。如果你属于自我主导型投资者，在市场下跌一段时间后倾向于卖出、而不是增持，这也意味着你需要缩减自己在管理投资组合上花费的时间，或者寻求专业人士的帮助。（财富中文网）

    There are three big lessons that all investors could learn from professional gamblers.

    That was one of the first things I learned when I went back to school this week. The Wisconsin School of Business, located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, runs a program for visiting business journalists. Each semester, they invite one down for a packed few days -- meeting with professors about their research, touring the facilities, chatting with students about the work they're doing as well.

    For the record, I lived in Madison until age 11. My father, Chuck Sherman, was -- I'm told -- a rock star communications professor. But I haven't been back for nearly three decades. And I had no idea what was going on in the business school. It's an interesting model: Students choose to specialize in one of 10 "Knowledge Centers," including marketing research, brand management, and -- the place I started my day -- securities analysis. They're taught by a combination of academics and folks recruited after years in their respective fields.

    The pearl about investors and gamblers came from the mouth of Mark Ready, chair of the department of finance. It made his colleague Brian Hellmer, a former portfolio manager and director of the Hawk Center for Applied Security Analysis, cringe. "We don't want to reinforce the casino gaming mentality of investing," he said. (He doesn't believe stock market games belong in financial literacy classes for that reason.) But digging a little deeper, he and Ready agreed that there are in fact a few things that could help investors -- not day traders, not market timers, but individual investors trying to get from where they are to retirement -- improve their performance.

    1. It helps to understand the odds. In other words, investors would benefit from a deeper understanding of probability, Ready says. Too many can't distinguish between luck and randomness. "They see meaning where there is none." The most common example: short-term price changes. "There is a lot of noise there," he says. "You can have a very good [investment] process and still not get it right." He also notes: Being right once is the same as being wrong once. The former doesn't make you a genius. The latter doesn't make you an idiot. It's your overall track record that counts.

    2. Look for the outliers. Most investors don't focus enough on this, Hellmer says. A professional football gambler spends most of his time not figuring out how much to bet on each of the games happening on a particular Sunday, but on figuring out which game to bet on, he says. Why is that? "Most of the odds are correctly set, most of the games are correctly priced. What you're looking for is the one game that's mispriced." Good investors benefit by doing the same thing -- trying to take advantage of a stock's (or the market's) overreaction to bad news or even the tone of the news.

    3. You shouldn't change your strategy based on one or two outcomes. How does a card counter beat the casino? Not by winning every hand, Ready explained, but by tallying up more wins than losses overall. The same applies to being the sort of investor with the ability to consistently outperform. That means closing your eyes to the daily, weekly, even monthly volatility, and focusing on the long-term performance. It's hard to do, Hellmer notes, even for high-net-worth individuals. If you're the sort of self-directed investor who's tempted to sell rather than add to your position after a particularly bad stretch in the market, it also argues for scaling back the amount of time you spend perusing your portfolio -- or getting professional help.