Know Thyself
There's a lot of advice and sayings out there about the importance of being yourself and sticking to your guns. Well, before you can do any of that, you have to know yourself. So we want to ask, who are you as an investor? Maybe you already know. Maybe you don't. If you're still figuring that out, we've got some thoughts that could help you.
What does your money/happiness curve look like? Is it curved or linear? Does it flatline somewhere? If so, where?
There’s the game of trading and the metagame of life. To win the latter, you have to Know Thyself.
The social rewards that come from imitating others feel good, but they come at a high price.
Here are 25 Anti-Mimetic ideas that can help us craft a life that is a little more free from the herd, and a bit more open to the spontaneity and wonder of new things.
“Oh, little Jimmy is going to 20-Years-Ago-This-Was-A-Second-Rate-University? I hear really good things about that school. Congratulations!”
“Thanks! We’re all very pleased. Everyone except my bank account, that is. Hahaha!”
It’s true, everyone is VERY pleased by the current system. Prestige university credentialing is a steam valve … \whispers\ just like elections.
The problem isn’t that we derive too much of our worth and value from work. The problem is that our jobs are becoming increasingly abstracted from work. Friends: Your work is holy.
It is a frustrating truth that good – even great – investors rarely know exactly what it is that makes them good. And so the inevitable guilty pleasure of investors – building portfolios from the best ideas of their various managers and advisors – is almost always doomed to fail from the beginning.
I can’t advise you on the Answers. I won’t advise you on the Answers. But I will advise you on the Process. Because that’s what we do for our fellow pack members.
Nobody likes to admit it, but the investment industry hires and invests with the smartest-seeming people that seem sufficiently likable. And it doesn’t work.
The thing is, Butch, right now you got ability. But painful as it may be, ability don’t last. You came close but you never made it. And if you were gonna make it, you would have made it before now.
Investing requires mental toughness, but it doesn’t require us to pretend that we — or our colleagues — are invincible. More often, it instead requires us to acknowledge our weakness.
The inevitable result of financial innovation gone awry, which it ALWAYS does, is that it ALWAYS ends up empowering the State. When too clever by half people misplay the meta-game, that’s all the excuse the State needs to come swooping in and crush them, just as they are with Bitcoin today they did with Bear and Lehman in 2008. Installment #10 from Notes from the Field.
The second moral license from a wise emphasis on passive investing is spending inordinate amounts of time on tilts, trades and tactical ideas that will never influence our portfolio results.
Every dog needs a job, and every investment does, too. No single dog can be all things to all people, and neither can a single investment. Nor can any pack of dogs accomplish anything and everything you like. The biggest mistake people make when they get a dog is trying to make the dog fit into the life they wish they led, rather than the life they actually lead.