Cancer is the great equalizer. Everyone is affected by it either themselves or through loved ones.
Andrew Lo
Ideas percolate. Through natural selection, the best ones survive.
Great investors need to have the right combination of intuition, business sense and investment talent.
My mother died of lung cancer last year. I felt helpless. As an economist, I thought, 'What can I do?'
Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.
Maybe we should teach schoolchildren probability theory and investment risk management.
The adaptive markets hypothesis says that all economic institutions, like our own species, develop and change over time, depending on the population of investors that are engaged with them.
If you rank the top 50 one-day moves in the S&P 500, a fair number of those happened within the last five or 10 years. That tells you that we're in a different, riskier market now.
The United States has the most sophisticated financial markets in the world, which does not leave much room to maneuver. But it also offers investors the greatest access to information and the ability to execute trades quickly and efficiently. So it is a mixed bag of opportunity.
If we are able to allow people to earn a decent rate of return, with sufficient scale, we can all do well by doing good.
Most people are overconfident about their own abilities. That is probably a good thing. But we would be horrified if a physician's aide engaged in heart surgery.
While neurological studies have tried to identify components responsible for fear and greed, the impact on finance is less clear.
During periods of extreme fear or greed, you don't have the proper balance between those two to generate market efficiency and you get extremes in behavior.
What makes this story so remarkable is that throughout my early childhood I had ongoing learning difficulties, particularly in mathematics. I struggled to learn the multiplication table, and no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't remember 6 times 7 or 7 times 8.
Some people might say, 'Can we afford it?' I think that's asking the wrong question... We should instead be asking, 'Can we really afford not to try?'
More and more investors may be coming into markets everywhere but that doesn't mean that the markets are really getting more and more efficient, even in the United States. It does mean that there is more access for savvy investors who watch the money flows.
I don't entirely reject the idea of efficient markets. It needs updating.
It's important to understand how people perceive risk, and how that translates into investment behavior.
Financial crises are an unfortunate but necessary consequence of modern capitalism.
If troubled companies want to explain away 2008 as a 'black swan,' then someone should take responsibility for creating the oil slick that seems to have tarred the entire flock!
