Mental Model: Time Dilation

Time dilation is a consequence of relativity in physics. Put simply: individuals moving at different speeds perceive time differently. The most extreme example of this would be someone moving at the speed of light versus a stationary observer. For the person traveling at the speed of light, time measured from the point of view of the stationary observer would appear to have stopped.

Crazy, right?

Take a moment and allow that to sink in. It is pretty wild to think about. It took me two passes through A Brief History of Time before I felt like I had a decent handle on the concept.

Below is a fun animation to help illustrate.

In financial markets, we experience our own form of time dilation. A high frequency trader experiences time differently than Warren Buffett. Here the relative velocity we are concerned with isn’t physical motion, but rather the velocity of activity in a portfolio of financial assets. The more you trade, the slower time moves for you.

Below are two charts for AAPL, one for the last trading day and one for a trailing 1-year period. All the price action depicted in the first chart is imperceptible on the second.

This idea of time dilation presents significant challenges for investment organizations.

The first challenge is the friction it creates between stated investment horizons and performance measurement. It is tough to manage money to a three or five-year horizon if your investors are measuring performance monthly. With that kind of mismatch, stuff that wouldn’t seem significant over three or five years starts to look significant (in a way, it is). And so you are tempted to “do stuff” to keep your investors happy.

While you should be focused on the “signal” from annual reports, you get bogged down in the “noise” of quarterly fluctuations in earnings. Or, god forbid, daily and weekly newsflow. Unless you are a proper trader, nothing good ever comes of focusing attention on daily and weekly newsflow.

Also, since people pay money for investment management, it is easy for them to mistake large volumes of activity for productive activity. Yet, just because you “do a lot of stuff” doesn’t mean your results will be any better. In fact, plenty of empirical evidence argues the opposite. The more “stuff” you do, the worse your results will be.

Here is an example of market time dilation from Professor Sanjay Bakshi. Years ago he executed a “very cool” arbitrage trade involving Bosch stock for a triple digit IRR. That’s an objectively fantastic result. And yet, Prof Bakshi readily admits to missing the forest for the trees. Why? He was operating on a different time horizon.

You can judge whether someone truly has a long term mindset based on how he feels about being “taken out” of a stock in a merger or buyout. Long-term thinkers don’t like to be taken out of their positions! They would rather compound capital at 20% annually for 30 years than have a 100% return in a single year.

They all explain this the same way: there aren’t that many businesses capable of compounding value at 20% annually for 30 years. When you find one you should own it in size. Selling it should be physically painful. Only phony long term thinkers are happy about getting taken out of good businesses.

Now, that’s certainly not the only way to make money in the markets. The trick isn’t so much finding “the best way” to make money as it is genuinely aligning your process with your time horizon. This is not a trivial thing. Particularly if you manage other people’s money.