Quote for the Week
Investment based on genuine long-term expectation is so difficult to-day as to be scarcely practicable. He who attempts it must surely lead much more laborious days and run greater risks than he who tries to guess better than the crowd how the crowd will behave; and, given equal intelligence, he may make more disastrous mistakes. There is no clear evidence from experience that the investment policy which is socially advantageous coincides with that which is most profitable. It needs more intelligence to defeat the forces of time and our ignorance of the future than to beat the gun. Moreover, life is not long enough; — human nature desires quick results, there is a peculiar zest in making money quickly, and remoter gains are discounted by the average man at a very high rate. The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and over exacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll. Furthermore, an investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money— a further reason for the higher return from the pastime to a given stock of intelligence and resources. Finally it is the long-term investor, he who most promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for most criticism, wherever investment funds are managed by committees or boards or banks. For it is in the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. — John Maynard Keynes (source)
From the Archives
Last Call
- The Four Pillars of Rationality (According to Charlie Munger) – Kingswell
- 10 Charts That Address Concerns on Recession Fears, Tariff Risks, And Market Volatility – Kitces
- Best Investments to Own During a Recession – A. Arnott
- Currency Chaos – Edelweiss
- Rebuffed: A Closer Look at Options-Based Strategies – C. Asness
- Everybody Needs Accountability – Better Letter
- We’ve Outsourced Our Confirmation Bias to Search Engines – ArsTechnica
- Mud, Water, and Wood: The System that Kept a 1604-Year-Old City Afloat – BBC
- ‘The Office’ Turns 20: An Oral History of Season 1 From the Writers Who Shaped It – Hollywood Reporter