Who's Counting: Winning at Losing Games
June 1 -- — There's an old story about a store owner who loses money on each individual sale but somehow makes it up in volume of sales.
New calculations by a Spanish physicist now suggest that this paradox may have a kernel of truth to it. The discovery by Juan Parrondo not only offers new brain candy for mathematicians, but variations of it may also hold implications for investing strategies.
Parrondo's paradox deals with two games, each of which results insteady losses over time. When these games are played in succession in randomorder, however, the result is a steady gain. Bad bets strung together toproduce big winnings — very strange indeed! To understand it, let’s switchfrom a financial to a spatial metaphor.
Imagine you are standing on stair 0, in the middle of a very long staircase with 1001 stairs numbered from -500 to 500 (-500, -499, -498, ...-4, -3,- 2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ...,498, 499, 500).
You want to go up rather than down the staircase and which direction you move depends on the outcome of coin flips. The first game — let’s call it game S — is very Simple. You flip a coin and move up a stair whenever it comes up heads and down a stair whenever it comes up tails. The coin is slightly biased, however, and comes up heads 49.5 percent of the time and tails 50.5 percent.
It’s clear that this is not only a boring game but a losing one. If you played it long enough, you would move up and down for a while, but almost certainly you would reach the bottom of the staircase after a time.
(If stair-climbing gives you vertigo, you can substitute winning a dollar for going up a stair and losing one for going down a stair.)
The second game — let’s continue to wax poetic and call it game C — is more Complicated, so bear with me. It involves two coins, one of which, the bad one, comes up heads only 9.5 percent of the time, tails 90.5 percent. The other coin, the good one, comes up heads 74.5 percent of the time, tails 25.5 percent. As in game S, you move up a stair if the coin you flip comes up heads and you move down one if it comes up tails.
