Quote for the Week
The really hard part about investment policy is not figuring out the best feasible combination. While it takes some time and analytical discipline, this part of the problem-solving is far from advanced science.
The really hard part is managing ourselves: our expectations and our interim behavior. Walt Kelly’s Pogo puts it as “we have met the enemy and he is us.” Most investors are too optimistic about the long run and much too optimistic about how well they will do compared to the averages, so they set themselves up for disappointment.
Even worse, most investors do harm to their longer-term investment results by trying and trying again to do better: changing managers and changing asset mix at the wrong time and in the wrong way. — Charles Ellis (source)
From the Archives
Last Call
- Family of Value: The Davis Dynasty – Neckar
- Letting Go: Why Selling is so Hard to Do – Flyover Stocks
- The Capital Cycle – Commoncog
- An Oral History of the Fear Index – Financial Times
- A Conversation with Renaissance Technologies CEO Peter Brown (podcast) – Goldman Sachs
- Why I Write About the Human Condition – More to That
- I’ve Been Doing It Wrong All Along – S. Godin
- The Cash Machine Is Blue And Green – Tedium
- How Hollywood Insures Its Biggest Stunts – The Hustle
- The Quest to Save the World’s Most Coveted Chocolate – Smithsonian