Nobel Laureate and co-originator of the Black-Scholes options pricing model Myron Scholes, Ph. D., gave a crash course to a sold-out crowd on utilizing risk management over stock selection at the Palmer House Hilton on November 17th. Over 250 CFA Society Chicago members and finance professionals braved a dreary day to learn how options might be used as a predictor of market prices.
Scholes maintains that as investors pursue compound returns, tracking error and portfolio mandates constrain managers to stay close to the benchmark. Management of portfolios is left to asset allocators and active managers will hug the benchmark in times of risk. Relative performance constraints or not deviating from the benchmark is an implicit cost. The take away is that average returns produce average performance.
When looking at bell curve distributions, Scholes suggests focusing on the gains and losses in the tails to manage risk and not paying attention to the averages or the “stuff in the middle”. Every performance period matters and as time compresses, risk increases with compound returns being asymmetric. Letting risk fluctuate around an average can reduce returns. He also opined that with time diversification and cross-sectional diversification being free, time diversification is more important.
So, given all of this, how do we get measures of risk? This is where options markets come in to provide risk prices. Per Scholes, people ignore valuable options information when they are constrained. As Scholes expanded on this theme, the audience learned about the fallacies of some of our industry’s well-known and highly utilized risk measures. For example, our much loved and used Sharpe ratio does not fit in with this thought process because it is a mean variance measure. The closely watched Chicago Board 
Options Exchange Volatility Index (VIX) gives correlations that are in the center of the distribution. Knowing the limitations of traditional risk measures, how can investors use option information? Back tested options information should be used to see the risk distribution allowing reallocation and management of risk in a portfolio.
The presentation concluded with a question and answer session. Attendees were clearly thirsty for information about this methodology from this industry icon and were interested in comparing it to momentum investing and other popular valuation methodologies.
