2024-03-15: Musings

An old query that never seems to go away. ‘What is the smart money doing these days?’
‘I don’t know; but here’s the thing: knowing what the smart money is doing is equally valuable to knowing what the dumb money is doing, as long as one is always right and the other always wrong.’ [And the dumb money guys are probably cheaper to talk to.]

Curriculum vitae: ‘Worked for X decades with Y major companies and in Z senior roles in multiple locations. Written best sellers. Sat on many boards. Knows everybody.’
People seem impressed by the number of jobs, frequency of changes, variety of responsibilities and connections listed in a CV. Perhaps. The same people should wonder if all those are sign of instability, restlessness, difficulty in getting along with others topped with a sprinkle of aggressive self-promotion.

In the category of useless debates: ‘Was the inflationary bout we experienced transitory or not?’
‘How would I know? No one ever bothered to define the word transitory. Are we talking minutes, days, weeks, months, years or decades?’ [For the record, I think it was transitory, though inflation will probably settle on a higher plateau than before the pandemic.]

It’s possible to spot which new technology or discovery will have big economic and societal consequences (think the internet or AI, or any other mega trend/theme you prefer). It’s much tougher to figure out who will benefit from it and which companies will be winners and losers.

Some things never change: ‘How should I invest in an increasingly complicated world?’
‘I’m not sure today’s world is more complicated than yesterday’s or even the day before yesterday’s. Investing is about organization, efficiency and discipline (mainly you, the investor). Of the three, discipline is the toughest to manage and this has been so over the centuries.’

On active management: a paper (thank you to @Florian Weigert for reposting it on LinkedIn) with an interesting perspective. Seems that good stock pickers are good at picking but not good at tossing. My summary: it’s hard to get it right once, but it’s even harder to get it right twice.

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Mildly negative and listless performance of markets last meek, despite the plethora of news items (employment, inflation, activity: all relatively benign, with inflation stabilizing above expectations).

[Cover Source: Axios]