Sometimes it seems that the
smarter people are, the dumber they manage their portfolios - and their lives, for that matter. In his new book,
Life, Fast and Slow, the economist and Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman tries to understands why this happens. While the explanations are complex, the bottom line is pretty simple: over-confidence is the main culprit.
I've seen it again and again at my workplace: brilliant people, who are right 99% of the time, often have a blind spot when it comes to the 1% of the time where they are wrong. In other words, they assume that they're always right. I think we all know people like this. Steve Jobs was one too - and while he brought one successful product after another to Apple, he also had some dazzling failures that he could never own.
But back to Finance. Recently, I've read
"Don't Blink! The Hazards of Confidence" in the New York Times, which made me think of how over-confidence is manifested in management of personal finances.
Kahneman describes how, in his army days, working as a psychologist, he and his peers never let the facts "confuse" them - they knew that their methods are sound, and any evidence to the contrary was discarded with or without reason. Analysts, astrologers and other fortune tellers have the same bias: they know they're right, they believe in their ability to predict the course of the stock market (or the stars, or what the future holds for you), and you can't confuse them with facts. Even if the facts show no correlation between their predictions and the reality: a completely random, unpredictable, efficient and chaotic market.
It's perhaps the greatest scheme of our time, that so many bright people, so many MBAs and PHDs are spending so much time in this futile pursue of a holy grail called "alpha" - these super investments that are better than yours. But perhaps the tide is changing: from Kahneman to
John Bogle more and more people see that those pursuits serve no purpose, bring no benefit to investors, and only reduce average portfolio returns by their annual fees and commissions.
The amazing revelation I had reading Kahneman's article is that this is not a huge conspiracy. It is not a well-held secret, passed from one generation of financial gurus to another. It's much worse than that: they actually believe in it. Against all odds, against scientific evidence, these people and firms, many of them very smart, truly believe that they, with their superior knowledge and skills, can edge an advantage in a market that follows a random walk pattern. Kahneman recalls how he presented financial management company with analysis of their own numbers, demonstrating that the bonuses they give to their star analysts have no correlation with future success, and proving to them that any relative success is transient and random. In fact, he proved to them that their entire merit system is giving random precious gifts to people who don't deserve them. They just stared at him, said "thank you" and "goodbye" and that was it. They believed too much in their system to let the facts confuse them.
Wall Street is asking us every day: "are you going to believe us, or your very own eyes?" I suggest you open your eyes.