Quote for the Week
It is a great mistake to believe that a speculation has been unwise if you lose money at it. That sounds like an obvious conclusion, but actually it is not true at all. A speculation is unwise only if it is made on insufficient study and by poor judgment. I recall to those of you who are bridge players the emphasis that the bridge experts place on playing a hand right rather than on playing it successfully. Because, as you know, if you play it right you are going to make money and if you play it wrong you lose money — in the long run.
There is a beautiful little story, that I suppose most of you have heard, about the man who was the weaker bridge player of the husband-and-wife team. It seems he bid a grand slam, and at the end he said very triumphantly to his wife, “I saw you making faces at me all the time, but you notice I not only bid this grand slam but I made it. What can you say about that?” And his wife replied very dourly, “If you had played it right you would have lost it.”
There is a great deal of that in Wall Street, particularly in the field of speculation, when you are trying to do it by careful calculation. In some cases the thing will work out badly. But that is simply part of the game. If it was bound to work out rightly, it wouldn’t be a speculation at all, and there wouldn’t be the opportunities of profit that inhere in sound speculation. It seems to me that is axiomatic. — Ben Graham (source)
From the Archives
Last Call
- Advice for the Kids – J. Clements
- Farewell, for Now – J. Rekenthaler
- No Perfect Answers – Humble Dollar
- Short-Term vs. Long-Term Forecasts – Verdad
- Notes From One Of My Favorite Warren Buffett Interviews – Kingswell
- US Debt is Risky: A Rant About Evidence-Based Investing – Klement on Investing
- How a Stubborn Computer Scientist Accidentally Launched the Deep Learning Boom – ArsTechnica
- The Death and Life of Prediction Markets at Google – Asterisk
- 2024 Nature’s Best Photography International Awards – Nature’s Best