When I was a teenager in Argentina in the 1980s, there was a weekly TV show called “Feliz Domingo” (Happy Sunday). It ran live for nine hours, between one and ten pm. It was a game show for high school students near graduation, who competed in events involving different skills. A typical event would have four or five individual students (or small teams), each representing a 30-40 person group from a graduating class. Students competed on national history trivia, blindfolded obstacle courses, performance art, etc. Some of the events were somewhat weird, it’s not easy to fill up nine hours worth of live TV (there were also live musical performances by all sorts of local bands such as Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, but I digress).
One of the coolest events was about memory and diction. You’d get a random trivia category such as Greek Philosophers, and you’d have to name as many as possible in ten seconds, no duplicates. I remember one girl who had memorized 25 items for each of 30 categories, and was capable of intelligibly reciting any 25 items alphabetically in 10 seconds. That talent earned her school one of 20 or so spots in the “final round.”
The final round went like this: there would be a locked “coffer” (El cofre de la felicidad) containing the grand prize: enough cash to send the contestant’s group (40 to 50 people) on a week-long trip to a ski town by the Andes. The host would put the key into a plastic cylinder and mix it with other similar-looking keys that wouldn’t open anything. There would be one key per contestant. Contestants lined up according to what event they’d won. The host would ask the next contestant in line his or her name, school, and number of people in the group. He/she would walk up to the cylinder and pick a random key. There would be five seconds of suspense while the boy or girl jiggled the key as it failed to open the lock. The process would repeat until one lucky contestant picked the right key, and… watch the video below, no subtitles needed.
I probably don’t have to spell out the analogy at this point, but I will anyway. You had to figure out how to participate in the show in order to have a chance to win. I’ll spare the details, but this wasn’t trivial (be in the right place at the right time). You needed skill in order to get a key (a chance of a good exit). And ultimately you needed dumb luck to pick the right key. If you didn’t get lucky… well, you might have one or more two shots before the end of your graduation year. Feliz Startup!
The biggest problem with the SV scene is everyone is looking for the exit before they even have an entrance built, nevermind the key to the entrance. Three names that you should explore as they all, individually, put to shame every single SV investor:
James Simons
György Schwartz
Ray Dalio
All three of them approach their craft differently, so that’s important to consider, too. There are others deserving of mention, but three different names with three distinct approaches should be sufficient to support my thesis that markets are not efficient and accurately described with monte carlo.
Keep in mind that there is a huge industry built on top of efficient market theory and the random walk thesis. Just because something looks random does not mean that it is.
“So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”
Lloyd Christmas