Everyone loves beating the odds. Everyone likes to think they have a plan or a system whereby they can do just that. The real- ity is rather sad.
Consider gambling at casinos. It surprises and amuses me to see countless thousands of pathetic, puffy-eyed hopefuls robotically inserting coins and pulling at the one-armed ban- dits, playing the roulette wheel, or craps, or baccarat, or what- ever. Just like the gamble of lottery tickets, casino games (with one notable exception) are permanently stacked in the favor of the casino.
As an example, take roulette. There are thirty-six numbers on a roulette wheel. Half of them are black, and half red; half are even, and half odd. If you bet a dollar on black, and a red number comes up, you lose your dollar; if a black number 46 REAL ESTATE RICHES
comes up, you get your dollar back, plus one more. If this was all there was to it, then you could expect to win half your bets (and make a dollar each time) and lose the other half (and lose a dollar each time). You would expect to come out even.
Of course this is not all there is to it! There would be noth- ing in it on average for the casinos, and therefore there would be no profit left to pay salaries, and rent, and electricity, and advertising, and directors’ fees, and staff bonuses, and vaca- tion pay, and insurance premiums, and on and on. So, in their wisdom, the casinos added another number to the wheel—a green zero. If the ball rolls into the green zero, then all bets placed are forfeited to the house. (To be exact, you can “buy in- surance” against the ball falling on the green zero, in which case you get to keep all bets except the one placed on the green zero—the “insurance premium.” However, if you did that thirty-seven times, then on average you could expect to lose the premium thirty-seven times, and win $36 once, so that you would still be $1 down.)
So, the way the game works is that, on average, for every thirty-seven spins of the wheel, it would fall on red eighteen times (resulting in you losing $18), it would fall on black eigh- teen times (resulting in you winning $18), and it would fall on green once (resulting in you losing $1). The net loss would be one dollar in thirty-seven gambled, or a 2.7 percent loss. This is fixed—there is nothing you can do to change these odds. (American casinos typically have two green zeros, making the odds 5.26 percent in their favor.)
Despite my contention that there is nothing you can do to change these odds, countless books have been written on do- ing just that. These books proclaim strategies for putting the odds in your favor.
For instance, one common roulette strategy is known as “doubling down.” Every time you win, you revert to your stan- dard bet of, say, $1. But if you should lose, then you double BEATING THEAVERAGESEASILY 47 ccc-deRoos_ch04_33-62.qxd 9/17/04 12:34 PM Page 47
your bet. So, if you bet $1 and lose, you increase the size of the next bet to $2. If you lose again, you increase it to $4. If you lose one more time, you increase the bet to $8. Let’s assume that at this stage you win. Then you would have lost $1 + $2 + $4, for a total loss of $7, but you would have won $8 (from your final $8 bet). At the end of each losing streak, you would be ex- actly $1 up.
Presented in this light, you would have to agree that so long as you doubled each bet until you won, and then reverted to the original bet amount, you would end each sequence with a win. You cannot lose!
If only life were so simple. The problem is that every now and then you will get a long sequence of losses. This presents two problems. One, all betting tables have “house limits,” meaning you cannot bet more than a certain amount. For ta- bles that accept $1 bets, this is typically $500. In other words, if you lost eight times in a row, and doubled your bet eight times from $1 to $2 to $4 to $8 to $16 to $32 to $64 to $128 to $256, then you had better win that round, because if you didn’t, you couldn’t double your bet again to maintain your strategy. You would lose and the casino would have $511 of your money. Two, even if there were no house limit, after a relatively small number of doublings, you would run out of money to place on the table.
Whatever your strategy is, you cannot change the odds. With roulette, you lose 2.7 percent of the time on average. Pe- riod. All you can hope to do is alter the ratio between the num- ber of bets you place before you lose all your money, versus the amount of money you lose when you do lose.
If you take 1,000 people at random, then on average they will have lost 2.7 percent of the money they bet on the roulette wheel. Your personal ability to do better than that is not based on any strategy—it is simply a matter of luck.
With the stock market, advisors always promote various 48 REAL ESTATE RICHES
strategies. Simple strategies are to invest in certain sectors (most noticeably of late, their advice was to invest in the tech- nology sector). Other strategies are to do what is referred to as “dollar-cost averaging”—buying more of a stock whether the price has gone up or down.
However, just as I have yet to see a strategy that can beat the casinos in the long run, I have yet to see a strategy for in- vesting in the stock market that can be shown to beat the aver- age over the long term. Is there a mutual fund out there that has consistently outperformed the average?
I have personal experience of this: I had more than a mil- lion dollars at stake in the stock market in early October 1987. Not one of my team of advisors could tip me off, de- spite all their analysis tools, computer hookups, and indus- try buddies, that a crash was imminent. Not only did I lose a lot, but they did personally as well. One of my brokers was reduced to teaching remedial classes after school to earn ex- tra money.
What would be a strategy today to beat the average perfor- mance of the stock market?
Well, I have a strategy to beat the average in the property market. It goes as follows. . . .