That’s kind of reassuring. I’m just starting to read about Kelly, and my first reaction was “and your knowledge of the final outcome comes from where?”.
It also occurs to me that “Invest in real estate, they aren’t making any more land” is an effort at Kelly prediction, and we all know how well that worked out.
It is a classic mistake to treat your estimates as known expected outcomes when calculating how much to bet. This is one reason why real world gamblers almost always use half Kelly or even quarter Kelly rather than full Kelly.
“Invest in real estate, they aren’t making any more of it” is, in effect, a prediction of the expected returns to investment and/or the reliability of investment. Kelly would advise you on how to take advantage of the expected returns from real estate, once you nailed down your beliefs more carefully. For real estate, Kelly is rather horrified, as it finds many people investing far more money than they have into a single house. That sounds insane when you say it like that! However, a richer understanding of all a person’s assets together with the tax advantages of mortgage interest, and the inability to cheaply adjust the size of that investment, can make that reasonable under Kelly if you think the bet is stable (e.g. that the house can’t go to zero if it’s insured, at least not in any scenario where you care much about that).
That’s kind of reassuring. I’m just starting to read about Kelly, and my first reaction was “and your knowledge of the final outcome comes from where?”.
It also occurs to me that “Invest in real estate, they aren’t making any more land” is an effort at Kelly prediction, and we all know how well that worked out.
It is a classic mistake to treat your estimates as known expected outcomes when calculating how much to bet. This is one reason why real world gamblers almost always use half Kelly or even quarter Kelly rather than full Kelly.
“Invest in real estate, they aren’t making any more of it” is, in effect, a prediction of the expected returns to investment and/or the reliability of investment. Kelly would advise you on how to take advantage of the expected returns from real estate, once you nailed down your beliefs more carefully. For real estate, Kelly is rather horrified, as it finds many people investing far more money than they have into a single house. That sounds insane when you say it like that! However, a richer understanding of all a person’s assets together with the tax advantages of mortgage interest, and the inability to cheaply adjust the size of that investment, can make that reasonable under Kelly if you think the bet is stable (e.g. that the house can’t go to zero if it’s insured, at least not in any scenario where you care much about that).
I think part of the situation is that naive investors don’t quantify—if real estate is a good investment, they don’t think about how good it might be.
It’s interesting to watch “Kelly” drift in and out of being personified.