Fragile vs. Antifragile Investing (What Is Antifragile Investments – An Antifragile Portfolio in 2024)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb invented the word antifragile in his book with the same name when he was looking for the opposite of fragile. Antifragile is relevant for investors. What is antifragile investing? In this article, we look at how you can judge your investment: is it fragile or antifragile?

An antifragile investment is something that can benefit from shocks, randomness, and disorder. We view Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway as such investments. We discuss antifragile investing and investments.

Fragile – handle with care:

Fragile is defined as an object easily broken or damaged. When you order something online that is fragile it most likely is labeled as “handle with care”. The reason is pretty obvious: it can’t sustain shocks, knocks, beating, or being dropped to the ground.  It easily breaks apart. The opposite is antifragile:

Antifragile – do not handle with care:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a full book on the opposite of fragile: antifragile. I quote from his book:

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure , risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better…….Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them— and do them well……It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it. Fragility can be measured; risk is not measurable (outside of casinos or the minds of people who call themselves “risk experts”)

Taleb stresses that antifragile is not the same as robust/resilient. A rock or diamond is robust, but they just are – they don’t gain from stress and volatility like an antifragile object.

For example, I would label the tobacco, alcohol, and brothel industries robust and resilient. Despite recessions, shocks, and changes in consumer preferences, they have managed to withstand the test of time – like rocks. There will likely be a market for these products, either because they are addictive or serve a need for human nature (brothels). They are little exposed to disruption.

Amazon and Google/Alphabet are antifragile

However, being antifragile can make a business evolve into something much stronger and better than simply being robust. Most likely such a company derives its antifragility from its culture, not products or services. Amazon is partly an antifragile company.

The coronavirus is spreading from country to country, but I believe Amazon can benefit from the virus. Amazon doesn’t rely on customer visits – featuring e-orders and at-home deliveries – and could actually find advantages in the current situation. Being antifragile is about having an organization that is receptive to change and can benefit from change and shocks.

Google/Alphabet is another company I would put in the antifragile category. It’s a creative company that keeps on tinkering via trial and error, and hence increasing the chances of “accidentally” stumbling upon new innovations. Google provides a cultural environment that stimulates small-scale experiments, occasionally resulting in a big payday. This means Google can gain on randomness!

Berkshire Hathaway is antifragile

Warren Buffett says he always keeps a solid buffer in cash for unknown and unpredictable events, making Berkshire Hathaway somewhat antifragile. He wrote the following in the shareholder letter of 2005 on page 20:

Over the years, a number of very smart people have learned the hard way that a long string of impressive numbers multiplied by a single zero always equals zero. That is not an equation whose effects I would like to experience personally, and I would like even less to be responsible for imposing its penalties upon others.

Antifragile stocks often have management with skin in the game (decentralized)

Why does Buffett want to have so much idle capital? One reason is that he is forced to as an insurer.

However, another important element is his skin in the game. Owner-managed companies typically have strong “leaders” that take a very long-term approach. Decision-making is decentralized  – thus much more antifragile and receptive to change. Such businesses normally don’t have any strategic guidelines, they function much more on simple heuristics and “gut-feel” and not on scientific guidelines and “streamlined businesses”.

Buffett does things without any grand strategic plan. He doesn’t walk into the office with a strategic mindset but concentrates on doing the things that make the most sense now.

We can think of Berkshire as some kind of self-managed company where there is no top-down hierarchy. This is extremely important because most people can only feel “possession/ownership” of a project or business if they are truly responsible for it.

Empirical evidence suggests this is much more important than the salary size.  This way, you can create some “synthetic” skin in the game and offset the lack of financial skin in the game. Another example of a decentralized and antifragile business is Canadian Constellation Software.

An antifragile investment portfolio:

We believe the Berkshire model is the closest you can come to an antifragile business model. Because of this, we created an antifragile investment portfolio of baby/mini Berkshire companies (Berkshire clones). There is no guarantee they will perform well, but we suspect they might (in the long run):

A capital intensive business is fragile:

Opposite, we have a business that needs to be handled with care, like, for example, a capital-intensive, competitive, and cyclical business. Such a business is at the mercy of the economy, and additionally could potentially be bankrupted if it uses leverage to boost returns.

Leverage magnifies the fragility of the business, and it’s hard to make acceptable returns over the long term. Unfortunately, the vast majority of public companies are within this category, as explained by Hendrik Bessembinder in his study from 2017. A few stocks have turned out to be good long-term investments because the competitive marketplace forces most return downward.

Airlines are very fragile:

A recession reveals those swimming naked. Currently, the coronavirus has halted tourism and transport, putting a lot of strain on airlines, a very fragile business. On the 5th of March 2020, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) wrote a statement that they expect airlines to lose between 63 to 113 billion in revenue in 2020, depending on how the coronavirus spreads.

An airline needs a lot of capital and leverage to operate; additionally, it’s an intensely competitive industry. The chart of Norwegian Air Shuttle (an airline listed on Oslo Stock Exchange) serves as a great reminder of the problems of investing in such an industry:

For ten years, the share price has gone nowhere. In early March 2020, Norwegian Air Shuttle is trading below 20 NOK, the lowest level since 2005. Despite this, as a consumer I have benefited handsomely by being able to travel cheaply back and forth between Norway and my home, usually at less than 150 EUR for return tickets (a 90 mins direct flight).

(Of course, there are exceptions in any industry: Southwest Airlines, for example.)

A capital intensive business is less likely to be a good investment (fragile):

Hassan Elmasry, then an analyst in Morgan Stanley, wrote the following in an article in The Journal of Investment Strategy Number 1 2007:

Companies that depend primarily on physical assets like real estate, factories and machinery for their competitive advantage are unlikely to earn reliably superior returns on their invested capital over the long term. Physical assets invite replication by competitors which often leads to excess capacity, price competition and erosion of returns on capital. In contrast, companies whose decisive assets are intangible, such as brands, patents, licenses, copyrights and distribution networks, can earn consistently superior returns on relatively smaller amounts of invested capital.

Elmasry measured returns against capital intensity in 2 200 public companies from both the US and Europe from 1984 to 2002. His result found an inverse correlation between returns and capital intensity:

 The evidence confirmed our own anecdotal experience as professional investors. For all time periods, the two lowest capital expenditure/sales quintiles significantly outperformed the two most capital-intensive quintiles. There appears to be a long-term constraint on a capital-intensive company’s ability to generate consistently superior growth in shareholder value. As previously discussed, we believe that this is because capital-intensive companies typically rely on tangible assets for their competitive advantage which can easily be replicated by competitors. This ease of replication encourages plentiful capacity, tough competition, weak pricing and lower returns on capital. In contrast, companies that are dominated by intangible assets can benefit from a more benign pricing environment, higher returns on capital and superior organic compounding of wealth. Investors should benefit from an investment approach focused on low capital intensity companies driven by vibrant intangible assets.

His findings are summarized in this chart:

Credit Suisse looked at the returns for 10 000 stocks in 68 different industries by looking at returns on invested capital. The graph below shows the difference between CROIC (cash return on invested capital) and the cost of capital. There are, of course, companies that make good returns in an industry that, on average, makes a loss, and there are companies that are losing money in an industry that, on average, is very profitable. However, unless a company is outstanding, there are industries that perhaps should be avoided:

But let’s return to the airline industry. In the paper by Credit Suisse, they did a deep dive into the airline industry to investigate where the most profitable niches are.

The industry is made up of many different companies and suppliers: airlines (Southwest, Delta, Norwegian, KLM, etc), airplane manufacturers (Boing, Airbus, Fokker, Cessna), freight (FedEx, UPS), Travel agents (Expedia, Booking), logistics (Amadeus, Sabre), airports (Arlanda, Heathrow), finance (banks, leasing companies), suppliers (Pratt&Whitney, Parker-Hannifin) and ground support.

The figure below shows the profit pool for all these industries. Airlines and airports use most of the capital, but at the same time are the businesses with the lowest returns.

A few businesses make all the returns – those with the least capital requirements, but the profits are too small to offset the value destruction from the airlines and airports.

As a consequence, the industry as a whole destroyed an average of $17 billion of shareholder capital per year through the 2004-11 business cycle, according to the International Air Transport Association:

(The airline industry has shown better profitability since this period.)

Tobacco and alcohol are robust industries:

Credit Suisse makes a book called Credit Suisse’s Global Investment Returns Yearbook annually. In the 2015 edition, the authors Dimson, Marsh, and Staunton, the three professors behind Triumph of the Optimists, contributed an article where they looked at the best industries in the US and UK between 1900 and 2015:

The worst industry was shipping, with only a 6.4% return, and the best was tobacco, with a 14.6% return (the US stock market had a 9.6% annual return in this period). The return for tobacco stocks is impressive, especially considering that the number of smokers has dropped from 50% in 1970 to less than 15% today.

Shipping is a capital intensive business, while tobacco is the opposite. Furthermore, it’s very difficult to obtain any competitive advantages in shipping, while regulation limits competition in tobacco.

Another “sin” industry has performed the best in the UK: alcohol.

Conclusion about fragile vs. antifragile investing:

The stock market is full of volatility and randomness. Companies come and go, and most companies vanish – they get merged, acquired, go into oblivion, or go bankrupt. Most companies and investments are very fragile.

Opposite, a business that is antifragile can prosper in unpredictable and random markets. We believe the best examples of antifragile companies are Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway. Unfortunately, these companies are rare, but we hope this article has given you clues on what to look for.

Disclaimer: We are not financial advisors. Please do your own due diligence and investment research or consult a financial professional. All articles are our opinion – they are not suggestions to buy or sell any securities. 

FAQ:

– How is Antifragile different from fragile in investment terms?

“Fragile” investments are those easily damaged by external factors, while “antifragile” investments thrive and grow in the face of volatility and stress. We examine the distinctions between these two investment approaches.

– What role does management with “skin in the game” play in antifragile investments?

Management with “skin in the game” often leads to a decentralized decision-making approach. This decentralization makes a business more receptive to change and better equipped to adapt to unpredictable events.

– What are the key takeaways for investors regarding fragile vs. antifragile investments?

Investors should seek assets and businesses that can thrive in volatile and unpredictable markets. Companies with a culture of innovation, decentralized decision-making, and the ability to adapt to change are often considered antifragile investments.