My unofficial Twitter mentor (e.g., they never accepted any such role nor do they know they play that role) messaged me in an exchange yesterday:
Ha, always be learning and good things will eventually happen. Cause your competition is almost always below average.
The second part of the comment regarding below average competition was what caught me, as a person with perpetual impostor syndrome.
In many ways, the market for investments in the developed world is one of the most competitive, if not the most competitive, arena that exists. While say, an NFL game includes a score of players on the field with 100k fans watching helplessly in the stands with some hope that their belief can influence the game on the field (not to mention the millions on TV), investing is different.
In investing, the millions of people are all on the field and only a few people watch from the stands or on TV that don’t play the game. You’re either on the field or out (by virtue of an index fund) and have better things to worry about. Among the millions of people that are on the field, a select smaller group of them are armed with billions of dollars in research, talent, raw capital, global scale, etc. Others are armed with massive compute resources, algorithms, data, and rocket scientist level talent to squeeze every last penny out of the market. A select smallest bunch of people just stand near the goal line patiently waiting for months or years for the right moment to strike.
The fallacy I often see is the casual interloper in markets that fools themselves into believing that they can play at the same level of the pros, the people that have decades of experience and the above advantages, just because there’s no security guard to keep them off the playing field when the game starts. They run around the field in a manic state trying to score within the field of pros. This person most often utilizes price and belief to generate a highly credible, in their own mind, investment thesis that they put hard earned dollars into. For example, they love their Peloton and the price of Peloton stock is -50%, and they believe that this is a mistake by the market. Nevermind what the valuation of the company implied as far as growth and profit expectations both then and now.
Worse is when an investor makes the above bet and the price of Peloton goes up 25%. They instantly believe that their specific thesis was the explanation. Specifically, the day this person decided to pay attention to Peloton, they called that it was undervalued and after they bought it, the market decided they were right and it was wrong, and here we are. More often it’s just blind luck or the overall market moving down then up versus that person’s prowess. The sad part is when this happens, it reinforces the person’s confidence in their ability to outsmart the market, and they increase the size of their bets. Inevitably, this person ends up losing a large amount of money when it doesn’t go their way.
Alas, I say all this not to troll the interloper in markets, but as a distilled memoir of my own experience and failures as an investor. My experience is not unique, in the sense that a common arc for any investor to go through is the stages of discovery, trial, overconfidence, obsession, disappointment, and ultimately despair. Once an investor goes through this cycle, it’s the love of business or trading securities (whichever style of investment that reflects their personality and interests) that keeps them on the field despite being pummeled early and often.
This love of the game, is manifested in a learning curve with no plateau. The game of reading press releases, research reports, SEC documents, transcripts, articles, etc. (or in the case of short term trading, a different set of exercises). Of using that research to refine the insight manufacturing process. The ultimate goal is a mirage, the goal being the arrival at a state in which confidence exists to pick one’s spots, but the confidence is accompanied by indefinite paranoia that the confidence will ebb if one isn’t constantly learning to adapt to the ever evolving makeup and interplay in markets.
Back to my mentor’s words, while it may be arrogant to say that your competition is always below average, my interpretation of the claim is few are willing to keep climbing the mountain of learning that has no peak. And if you keep climbing up versus just hiking around the mountain in circles, eventually your competition is for the most part, down the mountain.