Notes From the Road: Roadkill
September 17, 2018·0 comments
Every successful species believes its adaptations are laws of nature. The white-tailed deer jumps, the squirrel zigzags, the armadillo armors itself. These strategies worked so well for so long that the animals treat them as permanent features of survival. Then a car appears, and the very trait that ensured success becomes the mechanism of destruction.
• Investors have spent a decade treating temporary advantages as permanent truths. The strategies that thrived through low interest rates, US market dominance, and muted volatility now circulate as timeless wisdom. Simplicity, US-only exposure, and bond diversification sound universal because they've delivered results.
• The gap between what worked and what will work is widening, but we can't see it yet. A decade of success creates confidence that our heuristics reflect reality rather than luck. The longer a strategy performs, the more convinced we become that we've discovered something true about markets rather than something true about the last few years.
• There's a meaningful difference between principles that are actually timeless and strategies that merely adapted well to a specific environment. Most investors can't articulate which of their core beliefs are universal and which are responses to conditions that may be shifting. That blindness is the roadkill condition.
• When confusion arrives, the instinct to innovate often makes things worse. Desperate adaptation looks like trying cryptocurrencies as hedges, timing market turns, or abandoning diversification. These feel like evolution but are closer to panic. Success comes not from random experimentation but from holding your core principles while questioning everything else.
• The question haunting every investor should be: What am I confident is true about markets regardless of conditions, and what am I only believing because I haven't yet tested it against a different world? That distinction determines whether you survive the next environment or become a cautionary tale.
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