Untangling Skill and Luck

Abstract

Outcomes from many activities—including sports, business, and investing—are the combination of skill and luck. Most people recognize that skill and luck play a role in results, yet they have a poor sense of the relative contribution of each. The ability to properly untangle skill and luck leads to much better thinking about most day-to-day outcomes, and allows for sharply improved decision making. The process of asset allocation in the institutional investment industry is a practical example of the failure to conceptualize skill and luck. In the aggregate, institutional money tends to flow to assets that have done well and fails to consider sufficiently the role of luck. One recent study suggested that this misallocation of resources had cost these portfolios $170 billion from 1985 to 2006. The study’s authors conclude that those institutions “could have saved hundreds of billions of dollars in assets if they had simply stayed the course” instead of moving money based on a naive extrapolation of past results.