Question for Bill Fleckenstein

[powayseller]

I subscribed to Bill Fleckenstein’s column, and as part of that, you get to e-mail him questions to which he posts answers. I’ve done this a few times. Here’s a sample:

Ed Leamer from the UCLA Anderson Forecast concluded that recessions can be predicted by drops in housing. Of all the components of GDP, only residential investment is a leading indicator. (Res. inv. is per worker, so it’s about jobs, and also includes realtor commission.) The longer we go before adjustment, theworse it will be.

Leamer says you can predict recessions from the contributions to GDP of homes, which explains 30% of the variablity of GDP growth. The order of the downturn, and the recovery, is homes, consumer durables, business equipment, offices.

However, Joseph Elliott (Ahead of the Curve) predicts recessions by flat wages –> lower consumer spending. This starts the chain of lower production, lower capital spending, rising unemployment, lower wages. Stocks sink.

Which of these guys have you studied, and what do you think of their models?

ANSWER
• Studied? I’ve never looked at any of this stuff… it’s all academic babble— if they knew for sure, they’d be managing money, and then they’d know— it’s not about equations, but probabilities and guesswork.

[Anonymous]

Poway

That is the answer any great trader would give you. Here is an analogy about “economists.” One day the head resident at a major regional hospital was doing the regular rounds with a group of interns in tow.

He stopped at each patient, wielding a clipboard and noting their condition. He then asked for comments from the interns. He made notes, and moved on patient by patient, until they were through.

He turned to face the group, and said, “Chris(could be any name I just used mine), in all my years of doing this I have never seen anything like this. I just reviewed your comments about each patient. It has never happened that I am aware of.

You just mis-diagnosed every single patient in this hospital, have you ever thought of becoming an economist?

This is a joke out of the wall street joke book. Economists are notorious for being completely wrong about just about everything in the trading world. I am sure Fleckenstein was alluding to that in his answer.

They have no “skin in the game,” a quote that is widely used nowadays. Would you want golf lessons from a geek who read Tiger’s book, but has never played golf?

Give him a more targeted question about trading, and I am sure you will get a different attitude in his response.

Theories are great, but it is execution that matters. That is all traders care about.

[powayseller]

Great story. They are usually wrong, just as the fund managers. I’m sure they try to be accurate. They have an interest in being right, because that gains them recognition. Tornberg uses the past to predict the future. There is value in that.

It’s interesting – at the conference I attended, he perfectly laid out the groundwork and current problems, and then jumped to a completely different conclusion that most of us on this forum.

Check out a 60 minute video he gave a few months back, which is the same talk he gave on May 3 in San Diego. If you don’t have 60 minutes to listen to the whole thing, go to the last 10 minutes to catch the RE part.

I’ll do my summary in the next few days, have been too busy lately.

[Author]

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