The Overt & Covert Danger of Leverage

Buying stocks with borrowed money doesn’t make anything a better investment or increase the probability of gains.

It merely magnifies whatever gains or losses may materialize. And then, leverage brings destruction if things go bad…really bad. And they often do.

Nassim Taleb says that we should judge people by the costs of the alternative, that is if history played out in another way.

As he wrote in his brilliant book Fooled by Randomness - “Clearly, the quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome, but such a point seems to be voiced only by people who fail (those who succeed attribute their success to the quality of their decision).”

In the same way, be very careful of judging your stock market success by the outcome you achieve, but by the decision you made.

“Leverage can help me magnify my returns” is a great statement to make. But more often now, leverage – which is a result of arrogance created by good short-term returns or a result of survivorship bias, which is concentrating on the people or things that “survived” some process and inadvertently overlooking those that did not - will not only your destroy your savings and sleep, it will also destroy your reputation.

The legendary investor Warren Buffett wrote this about using leverage in investing in his latest letter to shareholders…

…borrowed money has no place in the investor’s tool kit: Anything can happen anytime in markets. And no advisor, economist, or TV commentator – and definitely not Charlie nor I – can tell you when chaos will occur. Market forecasters will fill your ear but will never fill your wallet.

And here is what Howard Marks wrote in one of his recent memos to shareholders…

While investor behaviour hasn’t sunk to the depths seen just before the crisis (and, in my opinion, that contributed greatly to it), in many ways it has entered the zone of imprudence. To borrow a metaphor from Chuck Prince, Citigroup’s CEO from 2003 to 2007, anyone who’s totally unwilling to dance to today’s fast-paced music can find it challenging to put money to work.

It’s the job of investors to strike a proper balance between offense and defense, and between worrying about losing money and worrying about missing opportunity. Today I feel it’s important to pay more attention to loss prevention than to the pursuit of gain. For the last three years Oaktree’s mantra has been “move forward, but with caution.” At this time, in reiterating that mantra, I would increase the emphasis on those last three words: “but with caution.”

So, move forward, but with caution. And please avoid leverage!