Today morning, I was having a discussion with my son about education. My thought is that the future belongs to those who inculcate the ability to keep learning continuously. Whatever your field of work, you need to be always learning and upgrading your knowledge and skills to be able to remain relevant. It is important in some professions today, but increasingly I think, it will be important for all professions. Here is a very good article that discusses this topic in slightly higher detail.
I was going back through my OneNote and GoogleDoc archives the last few days to clean up old junk and spent a considerable amount of time re-reading some old saved nuggets of wisdom from different articles and books. I plan to keep sharing them every week.
In this article, the author argues that with increasing computing and analytical power, it is increasingly becoming more difficult for small investors to beat the really good professional ones. Here is his reasoning.
The endgame here is that sophisticated professionals will seek out investing edge using data and computing power that is not available to "the average mum and pop investor," which will drive those ordinary investors away from trying to beat the market on their own. If they want decent performance, they will be forced to choose between passive indexing or hiring those sophisticated professionals to manage their money. People, again, find this worrying, and again I do not. (Again I think it is obviously an improvement!) We do not generally expect the average amateur to outperform the most sophisticated professionals in dentistry or brain surgery or plumbing or basketball or any other sphere of human activity in which there are amateurs and professionals. But for some reason that expectation is built into many people's thinking about stock markets, with constant bizarre results.
Thought of the Week
We need to continuously keep sharpening our saws. I have learnt so much, and continue to do so, just by keeping an open mind. With the
“I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.” ~ Elon Musk
“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” ~ Rene Descartes
Video of the Week
Anyone who has been reading my blog for any length would know that I am a fan of Stan Druckenmiller. He is one of the very best macro investors of our time. In the last couple of weeks, he has given a few interviews where he has talked about mainly the US economy and broader market trends. It is always instructive to listen to Druckenmiller.