Ten Commandments for a Crash

Joshua Brown wrote “Ten Commandments for a Crash”  – his advice for stock traders in a stock market crash.  Most of his ideas can be generalized to refer to any situation where large losses or even the threat of large losses occurs.

1.  Acknowledge that its a crash.

This is first and most difficult.  The natural impulse of humans when things look worse than they ever imagined is to close your eyes and hope that it was a dream.  To wait for things to come back to normal.  But sometimes the only survivors are the people who stopped imagining a return to normal first and accepted the bad news as reality.

2.  Pencils Down! 

This means abandoning your research based upon the previous paradigm.  Do not run the model one more time to see what it says.  All of the model parameters are now suspect.  You do not usually know enough to say which ones are still true.

3.  Don’t listen to “stockpickers” or sell-side equity analysts.

Get your head out of the nits.  Your usual business may require that you are a master of the details of your markets.  You are looking to build your year’s result up over 52 weeks, looking to create 1/52 of your target return each week.  But when the crisis hits, the right macro decisions can change your results by half a year’s worth of normal business.

4.  Ignore the asset-gatherers and the brokerage firm strategists,

Know the bias of the people you are getting advice from.  They may be saying what is necessary for THEIR firm to make it through the crash, no matter what their advice would do to you.

5.  Make sacrifices

You are going to need to let go of one or several of the things that you were patiently nursing along in hopes of a big payoff later on when they came around.  Make these decisions sooner rather than later.  Otherwise, they will be dragging you down along with everything else.  Think of it as a scale change.  The old long term opportunities mostly become losers while some of the marginally profitable situations become your new opportunities.  Choose fast.

6.  Make two lists.

Those are the lists of things that you might now want to start doing if the terms suddenly get sweeter and the things where you plan to dump unless you can tighten the terms.  Keep updating the list every day as you get new information.  Act on the list as opportunities change.

7.  Watch sentiment more closely

This is the flip side to #1 above.  The analysis may no longer be of help, but a good handle on the sentiment of your market will be invaluable.  It will tell you when it is time to press for the stricter terms from your list #6.

8.  Abandon any hope or intention of catching the bottom.

This may be an excuse for not making decisions when things are unclear.  Guess what?  THe bottom is only ever clear afterwards.

9.  Suspend disbelief.

Any opinions that you have that some aspect of your business environment will never get “that” bad will often be trashed by reality.  In case you have been asleep for the last decade, each crisis results in new bigger losses than ever before.  The sooner you get off the illusion that you know exactly how bad it can get, the sooner you will be making the right decisions and avoiding totally wrongly timed moves.

10.  Stop being a know-it-all and shut up.

Everyone out there seems to know a small part of what is happening that no one else knows and is totally ignorant of most of what is going on from their own internal sources.  If you talk all of the time, you will never learn those other pieces of the puzzle.

A good list.  Some things to think about.  A challenge to work these ideas into your planning for emerging risks.  Need to practice adopting this point of view.

Read more: http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2011/09/22/the-ten-crash-commandments/#ixzz1YsTTo7ky

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