Since 1996, it hasn't paid to be a thinking rational investor.
I have to take issue with half of this statement. No problem with the "thinking" part, since nobody would argue that most investors or most people bother to think very often.
The "rational" part is different. It seems to me like an arbitrary statement, where "rational" is a synonym for "one who agrees with me about how order should be maintained in markets". The implication is that some logical set of rules can be applied to a set of data, and will yield a result that should predict what markets do. But there is no such result. If it were like that, Warren Buffett would be a computer. When millions predict, you get this curve where some are right and some are wrong, some make money and some don't. All you can do is make a bet whose odds are calculated differently by different people. To me it's like playing poker: some people understand the game better, know the odds, etc., but success is mostly determined by guile or people-reading or luck or some other inherently irrational quality.
Might makes right in relationships among human entities, and money makes right in markets. There's no "rational", IMHO.
An irrational statement<g>?
Regards,
--QS |
