One of the most interesting ideas suggested by Ian Ayers’s book Super Crunchers is the role of humans in the implementation of a quantitative investment strategy. As we know from Andrew McAfee’s Harvard Business Review blog post, The Future of Decision Making: Less Intuition, More Evidence, and James Montier’s 2006 research report, Painting By Numbers: An Ode To Quant, in context after context, simple statistical models outperform expert judgements. Further, decision makers who, when provided with the output of the simple statistical model, wave off the model’s predictions tend to make poorer decisions than the model. The reason? We are overconfident in our abilities. We tend to think that restraints are useful for the other guy but not for us. Ayres provides a great example in his article, How computers routed the experts:
To cede complete decision-making power to lock up a human to a statistical algorithm is in many ways unthinkable.
The problem is that discretionary escape hatches have costs too. In 1961, the Mercury astronauts insisted on a literal escape hatch. They balked at the idea of being bolted inside a capsule that could only be opened from the outside. They demanded discretion. However, it was discretion that gave Liberty Bell 7 astronaut Gus Grissom the opportunity to panic upon splashdown. In Tom Wolfe’s memorable account, The Right Stuff, Grissom “screwed the pooch” when he prematurely blew the 70 explosive bolts securing the hatch before the Navy SEALs were able to secure floats. The space capsule sank and Grissom nearly drowned.
The natural question, then, is, “If humans can’t even be trusted with a small amount of discretion, what role do they play in the quantitative investment scenario?”
What does all this mean for human endeavour? If we care about getting the best decisions overall, there are many contexts where we need to relegate experts to supporting roles in the decision-making process. We, like the Mercury astronauts, probably can’t tolerate a system that forgoes any possibility of human override, but at a minimum, we should keep track of how experts fare when they wave off the suggestions of the formulas. And we should try to limit our own discretion to places where we do better than machines.
This is in many ways a depressing story for the role of flesh-and-blood people in making decisions. It looks like a world where human discretion is sharply constrained, where humans and their decisions are controlled by the output of machines. What, if anything, in the process of prediction can we humans do better than the machines?
The answer is that we formulate the factors to be tested. We hypothesise. We dream.
The most important thing left to humans is to use our minds and our intuition to guess at what variables should and should not be included in statistical analysis. A statistical regression can tell us the weights to place upon various factors (and simultaneously tell us how, precisely, it was able to estimate these weights). Humans, however, are crucially needed to generate the hypotheses about what causes what. The regressions can test whether there is a causal effect and estimate the size of the causal impact, but somebody (some body, some human) needs to specify the test itself.
So the machines still need us. Humans are crucial not only in deciding what to test, but also in collecting and, at times, creating the data. Radiologists provide important assessments of tissue anomalies that are then plugged into the statistical formulas. The same goes for parole officials who judge subjectively the rehabilitative success of particular inmates. In the new world of database decision-making, these assessments are merely inputs for a formula, and it is statistics – and not experts – that determine how much weight is placed on the assessments.
In investment terms, this means honing the strategy. LSV Asset Management, described by James Montier as being a “fairly normal” quantitative fund (as opposed to being “rocket scientist uber-geeks”) and authors of the landmark Contrarian Investment, Extrapolation and Risk paper, describe the ongoing role of the humans in its funds as follows (emphasis mine):
A proprietary investment model is used to rank a universe of stocks based on a variety of factors we believe to be predictive of future stock returns. The process is continuously refined and enhanced by our investment team although the basic philosophy has never changed – a combination of value and momentum factors.
The blasphemy about momentum aside, the refinement and enhancement process sounds like fun to me.
[…] of biases. They perform better when they are locked into some process (see here, here, here and here for the wordier […]
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Very insightful post and great blog.
I am definitely going to get Super Crunchers.
Have you looked at the magic formula Benjamin Graham mentioned when he was nearly 80 years old.
He mentioned that analysis can be replaced by a simple formula, something odd coming from him
Here is a link
http://www.gurufocus.com/news.php?id=8758
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