A Calm Surface Hiding Choppy Seas

 Imagine a portfolio that glides through market turmoil with uncanny smoothness, scarcely registering a wobble even as public markets careen. To admirers, it looks like a triumph of astute investing or steadfast nerves. To skeptics, it looks more like an illusion – the product of what some wags have dubbed "volatility laundering." In the private markets, where asset prices are not continuously traded, volatility can seemingly vanish as if washed away.

As the Financial Times quipped of such eerily steady performance, "in private markets, no one can hear you scream."

The term volatility laundering, originally coined by investor Cliff Asness, refers to practices that mask or suppress the true volatility of investments. Rather than eliminating risk, these techniques hide it from view – soothing investors with the appearance of stability while the underlying hazards remain.

Volatility laundering has become a prominent feature of modern finance, especially in alternative assets like private equity, venture capital, real estate and other illiquid investments. At its core, it involves a trade-off: by forgoing liquidity and immediate price discovery, investors gain portfolios that appear far less erratic than public-market counterparts. But that cosmetic calm can be misleading. Just as laundering money doesn't create wealth but obscures its origins, laundering volatility doesn't reduce risk so much as relocate it – often postponing the day of reckoning.

This article delves into how volatility laundering works technically and financially, who engages in it, and why. We will also examine mathematical models that formalize the mechanism, review notable cases where such smoothing has been identified or alleged, and consider whether sectors like biotechnology and healthcare – with their especially jagged risk profiles – are fertile ground for this phenomenon.

How to Wash Away Volatility

 In public markets, prices update continuously with every trade, ensuring that volatility – the day-to-day standard deviation of returns – is fully visible. By contrast, private asset managers have considerable discretion in how and when they update valuations. This gives rise to a few common laundering techniques:

Infrequent Mark-to-Market: Illiquid holdings might be appraised only quarterly or even less often. Fewer data points mean fewer ups and downs on paper. Between valuation dates, performance is simply reported as flat or gently trending, sidestepping the jagged moves a market-priced asset would show.

Smoothing Algorithms and Manager Marks: Even when valuations are updated, they may rely on models or manager estimates rather than observable market transactions. Optimistic assumptions and gradual write-downs can "stretch" any single period's change over longer intervals.

Lockups and Restricted Liquidity: Investors in these funds typically cannot redeem at will. Lock-up periods and withdrawal gates not only prevent fire-sale liquidations but also allow managers to defer recognizing losses. As long as nobody is forced to sell, everyone can pretend the net asset value (NAV) is stable.

Selective Disclosure: Performance is often reported only in aggregate or with a lag. The opacity limits outsiders' ability to detect volatility. If an asset plunges in value between reporting dates, the fall may not register until much later, if at all.

These practices create an aura of low volatility, sometimes even an impression of near-linear returns "up and to the right." The benefit touted is that investors are shielded from short-term noise and panic-driven trading. Indeed, long-term investing does demand a cool head, and private structures enforce that by design. But the cost is that risk does not evaporate; it simply hides in the shadows.

Critics raise three main concerns about volatility laundering:

1. Risk Underestimation: Smoothed returns understate the true risk. Investors may think an asset class is less volatile than it really is, leading to misinformed asset allocation. They might over-allocate to "low-vol" private assets, not realizing that the apparent Sharpe ratios are juiced by stale pricing.

2. Delayed Loss Recognition: By the time losses are acknowledged, it may be "too late." Funds can shield investors from the sight of interim losses, but if an investor must liquidate, the real drop in value will suddenly be revealed. There is a fear of being blindsided – discovering that an ostensibly steady fund has been nursing unrealized losses that only surface under stress.

3. Portfolio Disruption: The illusion of stability can encourage overcommitment. If private equity or similar assets seem safe, investors might pour in capital and let allocations swell beyond their targets. When reality intrudes (say, a downturn forces writedowns or liquidity needs force secondary sales), the adjustment can wreak havoc on a portfolio's balance.

In short, volatility laundering exchanges visible, frequent fluctuations for infrequent but potentially large shocks. It is reminiscent of an old cartoon: one character sweeping dust under a rug – the floor looks clean until too much accumulates and the rug suddenly bulges or blows up.

A Simple Model of Smoothing

 We can formalize the smoothing process in quantitative terms. Suppose an asset has "true" economic returns rt* each period, reflecting its real value changes. A straightforward smoothing model posits that the reported return rt is a weighted average of the true current return and last period's reported return:

rtreported = c · rt-1reported + (1 - c) · rt*,    where  0 ≤ c < 1

Here c is a smoothing coefficient (or persistence factor) between 0 and 1. If c = 0, there is no smoothing – the reported return equals the true return each period. If c is high (close to 1), the reported return heavily reflects the previous valuation, meaning changes are sluggish. In effect, the asset's valuation is "sticky," updating only partially each period and deferring the rest to future periods.

This induces serial correlation in reported returns – a hallmark of laundered volatility. In liquid markets, returns are largely uncorrelated from one period to the next (today's stock price move doesn't predict tomorrow's with any consistency). But smoothed returns show positive autocorrelation: if last quarter was marked up, this quarter is likely to show a residual echo of that mark, and so on.

For example, Blackstone's BREIT fund reported a first-order autocorrelation of 0.42 in its monthly returns, whereas a publicly traded real-estate index had slightly negative autocorrelation. Such autocorrelation is a red flag that returns are being "managed" rather than independently driven by fresh market information.

Crucially, smoothing reduces the measured variance of returns. Under the simple AR(1) model above, one can show that the variance of reported returns is scaled down by roughly a factor of:

Variance Scaling Factor = (1 - c) / (1 + c)

If c = 0.8 (meaning 80% of each period's change comes from the prior period's value), the variance of reported returns is only about 11% of the true variance, since (1 - 0.8)/(1 + 0.8) = 0.111.

In the BREIT example, the fund's reported annualized volatility was a mere 4.6%, versus 18.7% for a publicly traded REIT ETF. That is about one-fourth the volatility – a dramatic smoothing. The result was an "absurdly high Sharpe ratio" for BREIT (over 2.2) far above what any comparable public-market investment achieved. Clearly, BREIT hadn't magically found a way to eliminate risk; rather, the risk was being obscured.

Of course, no amount of statistical smoothing can defy economic reality forever. If true asset values drop significantly, a fund can only delay recognition so much. Eventually, either through periodic appraisal or when investors seek to withdraw funds, the accumulated hidden volatility comes due. This creates a potential time bomb: a fund can report placid returns for a while even as storm clouds gather, only to undergo a sudden NAV correction.

The Options Analogy

 Volatility laundering can also be interpreted through the lens of options theory. By accepting illiquidity and smoothed returns, an investor is effectively selling volatility insurance. In a sense, the fund's manager sells the investor an implicit put option on short-term volatility: the investor is guaranteed not to experience day-to-day price swings (they "strike out" that noise), but in exchange, the investor bears the risk of a larger discrete drop later (analogous to a sudden exercise of that option).

The steady 8% annual return that a private fund reports resembles the payoff of a short volatility position – small gains most of the time, punctuated by occasional large losses when the hidden volatility can no longer be bottled up. Some critics describe private equity as selling a put on market liquidity: you gain stability now, but if you ever need out during turmoil, it's like the option has been exercised at your expense.

One concrete way this manifests is in secondary market discounts. Investors trying to exit private assets often find buyers only at marked-down prices, especially during crises. In effect, the "option premium" shows up as a discount. For instance, during the 2022–2024 period of rising interest rates and public market declines, secondary sales of private equity stakes were transacting at steep discounts to stated NAV. In the first half of 2024, on average, private assets were marked about 12% higher than what secondary buyers were willing to pay.

Particularly telling, the most illiquid and opaque category – venture capital – saw the deepest discounts (around 30% below stated values). Venture funds, which include many biotech startups, had some of the largest "hidden" volatility, with real values significantly under water relative to official marks. These discounts quantify the price of liquidity and transparency: the gap is essentially the market's assessment of the volatility that has been laundered out of the NAV.

Who Practices Volatility Laundering?

 The prototypical volatility launderers are private equity funds and venture capital funds, which hold unlisted equity stakes. Asness's original critique was aimed at private equity's habit of reporting eerily smooth returns despite investing in highly leveraged, economically sensitive businesses.

By valuing portfolio companies only episodically (often based on model multiples or the last funding round), PE funds exhibit far lower day-to-day or month-to-month volatility than public equities – implausibly low, in fact. As two researchers asked pointedly in 2024: does anyone truly believe a 65% leveraged private company is less risky than a 30% leveraged public company?

The answer is obvious, and yet private equity performance appeared to defy it – until one recognizes the role of infrequent marking. Studies have shown that once you "unsmooth" private equity returns (using statistical techniques to reverse-engineer the hidden volatility), their standard deviation jumps to roughly that of comparable public stocks. The risk-adjusted returns (Sharpe ratios) then look no better than the stock market's. In fact, one study replicated U.S. private equity returns by simply holding publicly traded small-cap value stocks with added leverage – a basket that is inherently volatile.

Real estate funds are another key practitioner. Non-traded or semi-liquid real estate vehicles often appraise properties infrequently. For example, BREIT and similar non-traded REITs marketed to retail investors promised high income with low volatility. They achieved the low reported volatility by using appraisal-based valuations that barely budged even as public real estate indices swung wildly.

This worked well – until investors actually wanted their money back. In late 2022, facing rising interest rates and a downturn in commercial property, BREIT was hit with a wave of redemption requests (over $15 billion worth). But because the fund's rules limited quarterly withdrawals, Blackstone halted redemptions (invoking gates) once they hit a threshold.

The fund's NAV did not materially drop at first – illiquid assets don't fall if you don't sell them – but the inability of investors to exit at par indicated that the true market value of BREIT shares was lower. Indeed, Blackstone only managed to honor withdrawals after arranging new cash infusions (including a heavily courted investment from a Saudi wealth fund) to cover the outflows. Skeptics argue that BREIT's stable NAV was inflated; one hedge fund manager called it "the absolute definition of a Ponzi scheme," alleging that the fund relied on fresh buyers to pay redeeming investors while holding assets at fanciful prices.

BREIT's saga demonstrated classic volatility laundering: for years it showed smooth, chart-topping returns ~10% annually, even as publicly traded REITs languished. When rising rates hit commercial property values, listed REIT prices fell 20–30%, whereas BREIT's NAV scarcely dipped – until pressure mounted. By early 2023, facing scrutiny, BREIT did start marking some assets down and saw its yield drop; it even missed covering its full dividend from cash flow. Reality caught up, albeit with a lag.

Beyond private equity and real estate, private credit funds and infrastructure funds also engage in milder forms of volatility smoothing. Debt is inherently less volatile than equity, and high-quality private loans may genuinely have stable values if held to maturity. But even there, managers can cherry-pick marks.

A notable category is Business Development Companies (BDCs) – publicly listed vehicles that invest in private loans. Some research demonstrated that you could replicate the returns of large BDCs by taking high-yield bonds, leveraging them, and only repricing a fraction of the loans each quarter. That last step – infrequent repricing – was key to mirroring the low reported volatility of BDCs, explaining about 88% of their performance patterns.

Even hedge funds have been known to launder volatility under certain conditions. When hedge funds hold illiquid or hard-to-value positions, they may resort to "side pockets" (marking those assets irregularly) or use valuation models that smooth returns. Studies have found significant serial correlation in many hedge fund return series, consistent with smoothed pricing. After "unsmoothing" procedures, the true volatility of some hedge fund strategies is 60–100% higher than reported, and many funds' celebrated Sharpe ratios fall by 20% or more.

In extreme cases, we've seen fraudsters exploit volatility smoothing to an absurd degree – Bernie Madoff's infamous Ponzi scheme drew investors precisely by showing impossibly steady, low-volatility returns (around 1% gain every month with uncanny consistency). That was outright fraud, but it underscores the point: unnaturally smooth returns should always invite suspicion.

A Round Trip to Reality: Case Studies and Consequences

Public Pension Funds – The Transparency Trap

In early 2025, an analysis of 50 large US public pension funds found that their reported performance since 2009 lagged a simple stock/bond index by about 1% per year. However, that gap would likely be even wider if not for volatility laundering in their private asset holdings. These pensions on average had roughly 24% in private equity and unlisted real estate.

When public markets plunged in 2022, the pensions reported only a modest -3.8% decline for that fiscal year, while a benchmark 70/30 portfolio fell -13.3%. The difference – nearly 950 basis points of "outperformance" – was largely attributable to private assets not being marked down promptly.

In the following year or two, as private asset managers slowly adjusted NAVs to catch up with reality, those same pensions underperformed the public benchmark by a wide margin (e.g. fiscal 2023 saw +6.7% vs +12.2%, a shortfall as the lagging marks were taken). In aggregate, industry data indicated private assets were still significantly overvalued relative to what buyers would pay – with one advisory firm estimating an average 12% NAV overstatement as of mid-2024.

That implies that the pensions' true returns were worse than reported. In effect, public pensions have enjoyed the optics of steadier returns in volatile times, but the hangover comes later in the form of lower future returns and potential funding gaps. Critics worry that this opacity delays corrective action and can lead to underestimating funding deficits.

Endowment and Sovereign Funds – Chasing the Yale Model

University endowments, especially the Ivy League, famously shifted into private assets to reap higher returns. A less advertised benefit was the smoothing effect: endowments touted diversification and lower volatility at the total portfolio level, thanks to private holdings. For years this looked brilliant – endowments reported strong, steady gains with lower risk than a plain stock index.

However, as Markov Processes International noted in a 2023 "Ivy Report Card," the volatility laundering was masking how much risk some endowments actually took. MIT's endowment, for example, had embraced venture capital heavily (including biotech venture) and saw its true volatility soar. By one estimate, MIT's portfolio had ~21% annualized volatility (2014–2024), nearly double that of a traditional 70/30 mix and higher than any peer – owing largely to the embedded risk in its private VC investments.

MIT's own financial reports didn't flag such volatility, since annual smoothing masked it; it took a factor-model analysis to infer it. What happens when those private assets are forced to revalue? We are seeing it play out: several big endowments had lackluster or negative returns in 2022–2023 because private equity and venture marks finally got written down by 10-20% following public market declines.

Blackstone and the NAV of Darkness

We have already discussed Blackstone's BREIT, but it stands as a cautionary tale worth summarizing. BREIT's house-of-cards critique boiled down to this: its outsized performance relative to public REITs was driven not by superior property selection but by valuation lag and leverage.

Through 2021, BREIT drew in tens of billions by marketing itself as a stable, high-yield alternative to stock markets. Even as COVID and rising rates rocked real estate, BREIT miraculously "defied gravity," posting positive returns while publicly traded peers suffered losses.

The reckoning arrived when redemption requests surged – a signal that investors doubted the marks. By gating withdrawals, BREIT essentially acknowledged that immediate liquidity at stated NAV was unsustainable. Eventually, Blackstone marked down parts of the portfolio, particularly in sectors like offices that were plainly impaired, and sought rescue capital. The episode highlighted how volatility laundering can store up instability.

Global Variations and Notable Examples

Volatility laundering is by no means a purely American phenomenon. Around the world, wherever institutions hold illiquid assets, the temptation (and sometimes the policy) is to mark them infrequently.

In Europe, open-ended property funds have long grappled with this: U.K. property funds had to suspend redemptions after the 2016 Brexit vote and again in 2020's pandemic shock, because their property appraisals hadn't caught up with rapidly changing conditions. Investors who thought they owned a low-volatility real estate fund were rudely awakened by withdrawal freezes and sudden NAV cuts – classic symptoms of prior smoothing.

In Australia, large superannuation funds invest in unlisted infrastructure and private equity and use smoothing to report stable returns. After the 2008 crisis, Australian regulators noted that some funds' returns seemed unusually resilient thanks to lagged valuations of unlisted assets, which flattered performance in the downturn and slightly dragged in the recovery.

Biotech and Healthcare: A Special Case?

The biotechnology and healthcare sectors are known for extreme volatility. A single clinical trial result or regulatory decision can make or break a company. One day a biotech's prospects look golden; the next, a failed Phase III trial can vaporize 80% of its value. Investors often joke that biotechs are either rocket ships or lead balloons, with little in between.

This binary risk profile raises the question: do biotech-focused investors engage in volatility laundering, and if so, how?

In public biotech stocks, volatility is painfully evident – as anyone watching the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index (or the wild swings of individual drug developers) can attest. But much of the sector's capital resides in private venture-stage companies: start-ups developing new therapies, often funded through specialized VC funds or corporate investors.

These private biotech valuations are typically updated only when a new funding round occurs or a milestone is hit. It's not uncommon for a biotech to carry the same valuation on a VC's books for a year or more, even as scientific developments (good or bad) unfold behind the scenes. That means volatility is being informally laundered in the interim.

There are a few dynamics specific to biotech and healthcare that influence volatility laundering:

Binary Outcomes and All-or-Nothing Value

A drug either works or it doesn't; FDA approval is either granted or denied. These binary events can cause discontinuous value changes. Laundering this kind of volatility often means delaying recognition of likely failure until failure is certain.

For example, a private biotech might continue to be held at its last funding round valuation (say $100 million pre-money) all the way until its drug flunks trials, at which point the valuation is slashed to, say, $5 million for remaining cash – a 95% loss realized seemingly overnight.

The mathematical representation of this binary outcome can be expressed as:

Expected Value = Psuccess × Vsuccess + (1 - Psuccess) × Vfailure

In reality, the probability of failure may have been creeping higher for months (maybe insiders suspected trouble), but until the public confirmation, the valuation was "frozen." From the investor's perspective, volatility was near zero for a long period, then an enormous negative hit occurs. Arguably, that volatility was there all along, just not visible.

Regulatory Overhang

Healthcare firms can face long waits for regulatory approval or reimbursement decisions. During these periods, uncertainty is high but prices (if the company is private) are often held constant. A classic scenario is a medtech or pharma waiting for FDA approval: insiders might handicap the odds, but the official valuation on the books stays at cost until the FDA's verdict.

If approval comes, a frenzy of revaluation upward may occur (or the company IPOs at a huge jump). If rejection, a quick write-off ensues. The presence of a regulatory binary thus amplifies volatility once the outcome hits, but until then the valuation might be artificially stable.

Capital Intensity and Funding Rounds

Biotech ventures require continual infusions of capital to fund R&D. This means they go through rounds of financing that set new valuations. Often the existing investors have incentives to avoid "down rounds" (new funding at a lower valuation) because it would force recognizing a loss.

So what do they do? Sometimes they prop up the valuation by leading an inside round at the same price as the last round (a flat round) or only a slight bump, even if the company's progress might not entirely justify it. This is colloquially known as "extension financing" or "pay-to-play" to avoid a down round. It's a way to launder volatility – by not marking the price down, they maintain the illusion that the startup's value never decreased.

This practice has been observed when markets tighten: for instance, during 2022–2023 many biotech VCs did insider top-ups to bridge companies that would otherwise have raised at lower valuations after public biotech stocks had crashed. While not illegal, it does postpone the day of valuation reckoning.

Have there been identifiable cases of volatility laundering in biotech/healthcare? While not usually labelled as such in headlines, there are examples:

• Several high-profile biotech unicorns of the 2010s maintained rich private valuations until their IPOs exposed a disconnect. For instance, cancer blood-testing start-up Theranos infamously kept a $9 billion valuation right up until fraud allegations emerged – then it wrote itself to zero. That's an extreme case (fraudulent misrepresentation), but it shows how an illiquid stock can appear stably valuable until a revelation flips the switch.

• In healthcare services and medtech buyouts, private equity owners in some instances avoided writedowns through the pandemic even when revenues were hit. By extending holding periods and assuming earnings would normalize, they kept valuations steady. When some of those companies finally sold or revalued, the adjustments were sudden.

• The venture boom and bust cycle in biotech around 2020–2023 provides a broader case. In 2020–21, biotech start-ups raised record funds at high valuations (low discount rates and bullish outlooks). In 2022, public biotech indices crashed ~40%. Private biotechs did not immediately drop en masse; many had cash runways and simply delayed raising new rounds. Through 2022, NAVs of biotech VC funds generally held steady or with minor markdowns. Then in late 2022 and 2023, a wave of down rounds and company shutdowns hit, and VC fund NAVs belatedly fell. Data from secondary markets supports this: by 2023, venture interests (heavily life sciences in some cases) were being sold at steep 50-60% discounts in some instances, indicating those funds' stated NAVs were significantly above what the market believed.

In summary, biotech and healthcare do see volatility laundering, enabled by private funding and binary event dynamics – perhaps even more so than other sectors because the informational asymmetries are larger. The difference is that when the music stops, the changes can be more sudden and dramatic. The laundry cycle in biotech is long and gentle, but the final spin can be brutal.

Conclusions: Leaning Against the Laundromat

Volatility laundering sits at the intersection of psychology, finance theory, and incentives. It appeals to the eternal human preference for stability and certainty. Fund managers know that investors hate volatility – it makes them uncomfortable and prone to withdraw money at the worst times. So if you can package a volatile underlying investment into a smoother experience, you have a marketing advantage.

This is one reason private-market funds have proliferated and why some allocators strategically favour them: not necessarily because they truly believe private assets are less risky, but because the ride is easier to stomach (and, for institutions, easier to report to boards and beneficiaries).

From a strictly rational viewpoint, volatility laundering does not improve risk-adjusted outcomes; it may in fact worsen them by inducing complacency. A growing body of research finds that when you adjust for smoothing, the Sharpe ratios of private investments shrink and portfolio risk is often higher than assumed.

The fundamental relationship can be expressed as:

True Sharpe Ratio = (Return - Risk-Free Rate) / True Volatility    Apparent Sharpe Ratio = (Return - Risk-Free Rate) / Smoothed Volatility

Since Smoothed Volatility < True Volatility, the Apparent Sharpe Ratio will be artificially inflated, leading to:

Apparent Sharpe > True Sharpe

Optimizing portfolios using naive inputs (treating smoothed returns as real) can lead to overallocation to privates and a mis-specified efficient frontier, which is markedly corrected once unsmoothed data are used. In other words, the apparent free lunch of "higher return with lower volatility" mostly disappears when one accounts for hidden risk.

Sophisticated investors increasingly use techniques like Geltner's unsmoothing (a method originally developed for appraisal-based real estate indexes) to estimate the true volatility of their holdings. They are also demanding more frequent and transparent reporting from private asset managers.

It would be unfair, however, to entirely dismiss the rationale of volatility laundering. Proponents argue that less liquidity can be a feature, not a bug, because it forces investors to be long-term and not capitulate at every market dip. There is truth in this – behavioral biases mean many individuals do better when they can't trade. One might view volatility laundering as a tool that, if used with eyes open, helps certain investors stay the course and potentially earn the illiquidity premium.

The key is honesty about what is happening. It's one thing to say: "We hold these assets that will be volatile, but we choose not to look at that volatility except occasionally, for our own sanity." It's another to claim "these assets are not volatile, look at how stable our returns are," which is misleading. The former is a conscious aversion of gaze; the latter is a delusion or sales pitch. The intellectual integrity lies in acknowledging that the risk is there even when hidden.

One practical step is using adjusted volatility in planning models: for example, a pension might assume that its private equity allocation has a true volatility perhaps 1.2× that of public equities (as suggested by empirical studies) even if the reported volatility is half. Adjusting like this can prevent nasty surprises in funding or tail risk.

In conclusion, volatility laundering is a pervasive practice that serves a psychological purpose at the potential expense of economic truth. It works technically by exploiting the freedom of mark-to-model accounting and illiquidity to introduce autocorrelation and delay variance. It works financially by making portfolios appear more efficient, fostering greater capital flows into private strategies.

Those who engage in it range from the giants of private equity to the venture capitalists behind biotech breakthroughs, to the pension funds and endowments seeking stable growth. In benign conditions, it is largely harmless – even arguably helpful – but when the cycle turns, its pitfalls emerge: overstated asset values, liquidity crises, disgruntled investors and sudden write-downs. Like many laundering schemes, it can go on for a long time, until one day it cannot.

The intellectually honest stance is to neither naively trust laundered volatility nor to panic about it, but to decode it. Investors and regulators in October 2025 are far more alert to these issues than a decade ago, armed with better data and models. Perhaps we are moving toward an equilibrium where the sheen of smooth returns is taken with a grain of salt.

As Cliff Asness humorously suggested by launching a mock AQR "SMOOTH" fund, the industry itself is poking fun at the absurdity of pretending volatility isn't there. The real test will come in the next major market dislocation: will private asset valuations respond more promptly, or will we see the same pattern of delayed truth and subsequent hangover?

For now, volatility laundering remains an enticing business – "it's a good time to be in the volatility laundering business," one analyst noted wryly in 2025 – because appearances of stability sell. But wise investors should recall that volatility, like energy, cannot be destroyed, only transformed or transferred. A risk concealed is not a risk absolved.

In the end, risk will have its say, and the bills will come due. As the laundry proverb goes, no one gets to have clean shirts forever without doing the washing. In finance, you can delay that wash, but you can't avoid it.