Sunday, April 05, 2020

Behaviour Penalty

If something is free, you are not the client. You are the product. The same is true with the Stock Market. You don’t “play” the Stock Market. It is not a game. It is true that Traders can trade anything with a pulse with no regard to what it refers to. The “fundamentals are free”, because the product is the other people who are trading. If you are “playing”, you are playing against some of the most sophisticated and resourced poker players alive. Investing is different. There, the fundamentals matter. You are buying a slice of ownership in an underlying business. You can’t get played if you have a long-term horizon. Then what matters is the quality of the offering, culture, management, and people in delivering their problem solving. What matters is the strength of the company to endure through difficult times. To emerge. In a dynamic world where they have to respond to a changing environment. You don’t have to respond. You can sit on your hands. The “Investor Behaviour Penalty” is a well-studied phenomenon where the average investor underperforms the thing they are invested in, by second guessing and buying in and selling out at the wrong times. Sometimes, the best thing to do is nothing.


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