“Nowhere left to go,” Barlow murmured sadly. His dark eyes bubbled with infernal mirth. “Sad to see a man’s faith fail. Ah, well…”
The cross trembled in Callahan’s hands and suddenly the last of its light vanished. It was only a piece of plaster that his mother had bought in a Dublin souvenir shop, probably at a scalper’s price. The power it had sent ramming up his arm, enough power to smash down walls and shatter stone, was gone. The muscles remembered the thrumming but could not duplicate it.
[…] And the next sound would haunt him for the rest of his life: two dry snaps as Barlow broke the arms of the cross, and a meaningless thump as he threw it on the floor.
[…] “It’s too late for such melodrama,” Barlow said from the darkness. His voice was almost sorrowful. “There is no need of it. You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross… the bread and wine… the confessional… only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes.”
–Stephen King, ‘Salem’s Lot
Whenever the market falls, you start to see symbol-waving. This famous Charlie Munger quote about equity drawdowns, for example:
If you’re not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of 50% two or three times a century you’re not fit to be a common shareholder, and you deserve the mediocre result you’re going to get compared to the people who do have the temperament, who can be more philosophical about these market fluctuations.
This is core doctrine for the Church of Value Investing. It works for Charlie because Charlie has Faith. Unfortunately, many of us who wave the symbols of Buffett and Munger in the face of Scary Things do not, in fact, have Faith. We fancy ourselves members of the Church of Long-Term, Buy & Hold Investing when times are good. But when things go bump in the night, we find ourselves waving cheap plaster crosses at the drawdown monster.
And it works about as well for us as it did for Father Callahan.
So we make arbitrary changes to what are meant to be long-term asset allocations designed to capture structural risk premia. We fiddle with exotic alternative strategies we don’t properly understand. We sell to cash without any idea how we’ll convince ourselves to buy back in. We seriously damage our chances of achieving our long-term objectives.
This chart?
This chart is a plaster cross. I show it specifically because it’s the most common exhibit financial advisors use to harp on “a long-term view” in client presentations.
But if you don’t believe equities should earn a structural premium over gold or T-bills or credit over very long periods of time, this chart will do nothing whatsoever to help you when your equity holdings halve. Same if don’t believe your portfolio has enough of a liquidity buffer to withstand a lengthy drawdown. You will waver. The drawdown vampire will snap your plaster cross and eat you.*
How do you build Faith?
Honestly, I had only the vaguest idea how to answer that question, so I punched it into Google and found this article (no idea what The Living Church of God might be–link isn’t an endorsement). Suggestions include:
Prove what you believe (or try to, anyway).
Study what you believe.
Endure the trials that arise as you go.
Because ultimately, there are no shortcuts to Faith.
Faith is a Process, not an Answer.
You can’t borrow conviction.
*Yeah, I know Barlow doesn’t actually kill Father Callahan in ‘Salem’s Lot. ‘Salem’s Lot purists can extend the metaphor and imagine the drawdown vampire turning them into unclean market-timers, doomed to wander the earth for all eternity with low returns and even less credibility.