Comment by cyberlab

4 years ago

Naval Ravikant has a small post about this here: https://nav.al/kelly-criterion

I first heard about it from him. He summarizes it as follows:

> Naval: The Kelly criterion is a popularized mathematical formulation of a simple concept. The simple concept is: Don’t risk everything. Stay out of jail. Don’t bet everything on one big gamble. Be careful how much you bet each time, so you don’t lose the whole kitty.

Lol. He must have never met anyone who has bet full Kelly.

  • Seriously. Full Kelly betting involves the use of significant leverage. The correct Kelly bet on the S&P index would be long 2.5x your total wealth.

    • You are right, but with execution risk / slippage it gets closer to 2x (2x and 3x are both close to 2.5x, but 2x has been performing better in the past).