Monthly Archives: May 2016

Rent or buy

Suppose you were offered the choice between investing in one of two assets. The first, asset A, has a long term real price history (i.e. with inflation stripped out) which looks like this:

Long term historical return of asset A, after inflation, log scale.
Long term historical return of asset A, after inflation, log scale.

It seems that the real price of the asset hasn’t gone anywhere in the last 125 years, with an average compounded growth rate of about half a percent. The asset also appears to be needlessly volatile for such a poor performance.

Asset B is shown in the next plot by the red line, with asset A shown again for comparison (but with a different vertical scale):

Long term historical return of asset A (blue line) and B (red line), after inflation, log scale.
Long term historical return of assets A (blue line) and B (red line), after inflation, log scale.

Note again this is a log scale, so  asset B has increased in price by more than a factor of a thousand, after inflation, since 1890. The average compounded growth rate, after inflation, is 6.6 percent – an improvement of over 6 percent compared to asset A.

On the face of it, it would appear that asset B – the steeply climbing red line – would be the better bet. But suppose that everyone around you believed that asset A was the correct way to build wealth. Not only were people investing their life savings in asset A, but they were taking out highly leveraged positions in order to buy as much of it as possible. Parents were lending their offspring the money to make a down payment on a loan so that they wouldn’t be deprived. Other buyers (without rich parents) were borrowing the down payment from secondary lenders at high interest rates. Foreigners were using asset A as a safe store of wealth, one which seemed to be mysteriously exempt from anti-money laundering regulations. In fact, asset A had become so systemically important that a major fraction of the country’s economy was involved in either building it, selling it, or financing it.

You may have already guessed that the blue line is the US housing market (based on the Case-Shiller index), and the red line is the S&P 500 stock market index, with dividends reinvested. The housing index ignores factors such as the improvement in housing stock, so really measures the value of residential land. The stock market index (again based on Case-Shiller data) is what you might get from a hypothetical index fund. In either case, things like management and transaction fees have been ignored.

So why does everyone think housing is a better investment than the stock market?

The RentOrBuyer

Of course, the comparison isn’t quite fair. For one thing, you can live in a house – an important dividend in itself – while a stock market portfolio is just numbers in an account. But the vast discrepancy between the  two means that we have to ask, is housing a good place to park your money, or is it better in financial terms to rent and invest your savings?

As an example, I was recently offered the opportunity to buy a house in the Toronto area before it went on the market. The price was $999,000, which is about average for Toronto. It was being rented out at $2600 per month. Was it a good deal?

Usually real estate decisions are based on two factors – what similar properties are selling for, and what the rate of appreciation appears to be. In this case I was told that the houses on the street were selling for about that amount, and furthermore were going up by about a $100K per year (the Toronto market is very hot right now). But both of these factors depend on what other people are doing and thinking about the market – and group dynamics are not always the best measure of value (think the Dutch tulip bulb crisis).

A potentially more useful piece of information is the current rent earned by the property. This gives a sense of how much the house is worth as a provider of housing services, rather than as a speculative investment, and therefore plays a similar role as the earnings of a company. And it offers a benchmark to which we can compare the price of the house.

Consider two different scenarios, Buy and Rent. In the Buy scenario, the costs include the initial downpayment, mortgage payments, and monthly maintenance fees (including regular repairs, utilities, property taxes, and accrued expenses for e.g. major renovations). Once the mortgage period is complete the person ends up with  a fully-paid house.

For the Rent scenario, we assume identical initial and monthly outflows. However the housing costs in this case only involve rent and utilities. The initial downpayment is therefore invested, as are any monthly savings compared to the Buy scenario. The Rent scenario therefore has the same costs as the Buy scenario, but the person ends up with an investment portfolio instead of a house. By showing which of these is worth more, we can see whether in financial terms it is better to buy or rent.

This is the idea behind our latest web app: the RentOrBuyer. By supplying values for price, mortgage rates, expected investment returns, etc., the user can compare the total cost of buying or renting a property and decide whether that house is worth buying. (See also this Globe and Mail article, which also suggests useful estimates for things like maintenance costs.)

RentOrBuyerScreenshot1a

The RentOrBuyer app allows the user to compare the overall cumulative cost of buying or renting a home.

RentOrBuyerScreenshot2a

The Rent page gives details about the rent scenario including a plot of cumulative costs.

For the $999,000 house, and some perfectly reasonable assumptions for the parameters, I estimate savings by renting of about … a million dollars. Which is certainly enough to give one pause. Give it a try yourself before you buy that beat up shack!

Of course, there are many uncertainties involved in the calculation. Numbers like interest rates and returns on investment are liable to change. We also don’t take into account factors such as taxation, which may have an effect, depending on where you live. However, it is still possible to make reasonable assumptions. For example, an investment portfolio can be expected to earn more over a long time period than a house (a house might be nice, but it’s not going to be the next Apple). The stock market is prone to crashes, but then so is the property market as shown by the first figure. Mortgage rates are at historic lows and are likely to rise.

While the RentOrBuyer can only provide an estimate of the likely outcome, the answers it produces tend to be reasonably robust to changes in the assumptions, with a fair ratio of house price to rent typically working out in the region of 200-220. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is not far off the historical average. Institutions such as the IMF and central banks use this ratio along with other metrics such as the ratio of average prices to earnings to detect housing bubbles. As an example, according to Moody’s Analytics, the average ratio for metro areas in the US was near its long-term average of about 180 in 2000, reached nearly 300 in 2006 with the housing bubble, and was back to 180 in 2010.

House prices in many urban areas – in Canada, Toronto and especially Vancouver come to mind – have seen a remarkable run-up in price in recent years (see my World Finance article). However this is probably due to a number of factors such as ultra-low interest rates following the financial crash, inflows of (possibly laundered) foreign cash, not to mention a general enthusiasm for housing which borders on mania. The RentOrBuyer app should help give some perspective, and a reminder that the purpose of a house is to provide a place to live, not a vehicle for gambling.

Try the RentOrBuyer app here.

References

Housing in Crisis: When Will Metro Markets Recover? Mark Zandi, Celia Chen, Cristian deRitis, Andres Carbacho-Burgos, Moody’s Economy.com, February 2009.

How do you calculate confidence intervals for a prediction?

This is a question that comes up frequently in forecasting. But it is surprisingly hard to answer, because it boils down to predicting how accurate a forecast will be – a prediction about a prediction. Prediction squared.

One approach is to base the estimate on past errors in similar situations. This method is used for example by the National  Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) in France, who wrote  that “the distribution of forecasting errors calculated from past exercises is a reliable indicator of the distribution of future errors and hence of the uncertainty  surrounding a given forecast” (see this research paper).

But this assumes that the new data will follow a familiar pattern – which may not be the case if for example you are trying to predict the effect of a novel economic policy, or a new drug, or climate change.

Another approach is to randomly perturb model parameters. But this has problems of its own.

To illustrate this, consider a simple linear model x(t) = k*t + x0, and suppose we want to predict the state at time t=1 based on an observation at t=0. Without loss of generality we can set the expected slope of the model to k=0, so the prediction is a persistence forecast: x1 = x0 (here x1 = x(1) and x0 = x(0)). Treating errors as random variables, then (in terms of variance) the error in the prediction, relative to the observation, will be the sum of the variance of the initial and final observational errors (see note below for details).

Schematic for error in persistence model prediction. Black points are initial and final observations, with error bounds. Red line is true state. Blue dashed line is model prediction. Note assumption that persistence model is correct.
Schematic for error in persistence model prediction. Black points are initial and final observations, with error bounds. Red line is true state (assumed to remain constant). Blue dashed line is prediction based on persistence model. Because the model is correct, all error is due to observations.

This makes sense since we are assuming the model is perfect, so all error comes from the observations. But in the real world, model error is not usually zero! Observational error is only part of the puzzle. So how do we estimate the contribution of model error?

As mentioned above, a typical approach is to perturb the parameters of the model by some reasonable amount, or do a Monte Carlo over a range of parameter values. (See paper on ensemble forecasting with model error.) For our simple linear model, a Monte Carlo simulation using a normal distribution around 0 with variance w for the parameter k would then give an ensemble of model predictions, with the same variance of w. Again this error will add to the error due to the observations.

This all sounds very logical and scientific, and versions of this approach are used by everyone from central bankers to weather forecasters. But again there is a catch, because the answer will depend on the parameter range that we selected. In other words, we can get whatever answer we want by choosing the range.

Of course, one can argue for a particular range – but if we are forecasting a new situation, we can’t base the estimate reliably on past data.

And there is an even more intractable issue – which is that the prediction error may be due not to parameter error, but to model structure. What if the actual system is not linear? (It probably isn’t.)

The ultimate problem is that the frequentist approach to statistics breaks down completely in forecasting – it relies on analyzing data, but the whole point of forecasting is that there is no data to measure (otherwise you could just measure it and not bother with the forecast).

Fortunately there is a solution, or at least an intellectually consistent method, which is to take a Bayesian approach. Unlike the commonly-taught frequentist approach, which treats probabilities as a measure of the frequency of observed events, the Bayesian approach interprets probabilities as a measure of degrees of belief. And in forecasting, confidence intervals ultimately are a measure of one’s confidence in the model.

In the case of our simple model, the idea is to come up with an initial confidence interval, based for example on previous experience, but see it as an estimate only, and refine it as more data comes in.

Of course this requires admitting that the confidence interval relies on subjective estimates. However doing so can help to avoid another problem in mathematical modelling, which is the tendency of frequentist error estimates to ignore the effect of context and prior information. Read our article on the BayesianOpinionator.

Notes:

For the simple linear model case, prediction error is the sum of the initial and final errors. We’ll use x to denote predictions, y for the true state, z for observations, and e for observational errors.

Suppose that the observed initial condition z0 is observed with an error e0, and the observed final point z1 has an error e1. So the true initial condition is y0 = z0 + e0, and the true final state is y1 = z1+ e1.

If we assume there is no model error, then y1 = y0. It follows that the difference between the forecast x1 = z0 and the observed final state z1 is:

error = z1- z0 = y1 – e1 – y0 + e0 = e0 – e1.

If the errors are assumed to be normal with variance v0 and v1, then the forecast error has variance v0 + v1 (variance is additive), which allows us to determine confidence intervals. So for example a 95% confidence interval would be +/-1.96 times the standard deviation.

If we assume that model error contributes an error at time 1 with variance w1, then again the variances are additive, and the total will increase to v0 + v1 + w1.

The BayesianOpionionator

I recently finished Robert Matthew’s excellent book Chancing it: The laws of chance – and what they mean for you. One of the themes of the book is that reliance on conventional statistical methods, such as the p-value for measuring statistical significance, can lead to misleading results.

An example provided by Matthews is a UK study (known as The Grampian Region Early Anistreplase Trial, aka GREAT) from the early 1990s of clot-fighting drugs for heart attack patients, which appeared to show that administering the drugs before they reached hospital reduced the risk of death by as much as 77 percent. The range of the effect was large, but was still deemed statistically significant according to the usual definition. However subsequent studies showed that the effect of the drug was much smaller.

Pocock and Spiegelhalter (1992) had already argued that prior studies suggested a smaller effect. They used a Bayesian approach in which a prior belief is combined with the new data to arrive at a posterior result. The impact of a particular study depends not just on its apparent size, but also on factors such as the spread. Their calculations showed that the posterior distribution for the GREAT study was much closer to the (less exciting) prior than to the experimental results. The reason was that the experimental spread was large, which reduced its impact in the calculation.

Given the much-remarked low degree of reproducibility of clinical studies (in the US alone it has been estimated that approximately US$28,000,000,000 is spent on preclinical research that is not reproducible) it seems that a Bayesian approach could prove useful in many cases. To that end, we introduce the BayesianOpinionator, a web app for incorporating the effect of prior beliefs when determining the impact of a statistical study.

Screenshot of the Bayesian Opionator
Screenshot of the BayesianOpinionator

The data for the BayesianOpinionator app is assumed to be in the form of a comparison between two cases, denoted null and treated. For example in a clinical trial the treated case could correspond to a patient population who are treated with a particular drug, and the null case would be a comparison group that are untreated. As mentioned already, a common problem with such studies is that they produce results which appear to be statistically significant, but later turn out to be caused by a fluke. In this case the BayesianOpinionator will help to determine how seriously the results should be taken, by taking prior beiefs and data into account. The method works by representing data in terms of binomial distributions, which as seen below lead to a simple and intuitive way of applying weights to different effects in order to gauge their impact.

The New Data page is used to input the trial results, which can be in a number of different forms. The first is a binary table, with the two options denoted Pos and Neg – for example these could represent fatalities versus non-fatalities. The next is a probability distribution, where the user specifies the mean and the standard deviation of the probability p of the event taking place for each case. Finally, studies are sometimes reported as a range of the odds ratio (OR). The odds for a probability p is defined as p/1-p, so is the ratio of the chance of an event happening to the chance of it not happening. The OR is the odds of the treated case, divided by the odds of the null case. An OR of 1 represents no change, and an OR range of 0.6 to 1 would imply up to 40 percent improvement. Once the odds range is specified, the program searches for a virtual trial which gives the correct range. (The user is also asked to specify a null mean, otherwise the result is underdetermined.)

In all cases, the result is a binomial distribution for the treated and null cases, with a probability p that matches the average chance of a positive event taking place. Note that the problems studied need not be limited to binary events. For example, the data could correspond to diameter growth of a tumor with or without treatment, from a scale of 0 to 1. Alternatively, when data is input using the probability range option, a range can be chosen to scale p between any two end points, which could represent the minimum and maximum of a particular variable. In other words, while the binomial distribution is based on a sequence of binary outcomes, it generalises to continuous cases while retaining its convenient features.

In the next page Prior, the user inputs the same type of information to represent their prior beliefs about a trial. Again, this information is used to generate binomial distributions for the prior case. Finally, the two sets are pooled together in order to give the posterior result on the next page. The posterior is therefore literally the sum of the prior and the new data.

The next page, Odds, shows how the new results compare with the prior in terms of impact on the posterior. The main plot shows the log-OR distribution, which is approximately normal. A feature of the odds ratio is that it allows for a simplified representation within the Bayesian framework. The posterior distribution can be calculated as the weighted sum of the prior and the new data. The weights are given in table form, and are represented graphically by the bubble plot in the sidebar. The size of the bubbles represents spread of log-OR, while vertical position represents weight of the data, with heavy at the bottom.

As shown by Matthews (see this paper), the log-OR plot allows one to determine a critical prior interval (CPI) which can be viewed as the minimum necessary in order for the new result to be deemed statistically significant (i.e. has a 95 percent chance of excluding the possibility of no effect). If the CPI is more extreme than the result, this implies that the posterior result will not be significant unless one already considers the CPI to be realistic. For clinical trials, which for ethical reasons assume no clear advantage between the null and treated cases, the CPI acts as a reality check on new results, because if the results are very striking it shows how flexible the prior needs to be in order to see them as meaningful.

The BayesianOpinionator Shiny app can be accessed here.