People’s lives are a reflection of the experiences they’ve had and the people they’ve met, a lot of which are driven by luck, accident, and chance. And when it’s hard to know we default to the extremes of assuming failures are predominantly caused by mistakes. Did failed businesses not try hard enough? Were bad investments not thought through well enough? Are wayward careers the product of laziness? By sheer chance, would you expect 100 of them to become billionaires predominately off luck?” You would reply, “Of course.” But then if I ask you to name those investors – to their face – you will back down. If I say, “There are a billion investors in the world. But since it’s hard to quantify luck, and rude to suggest people’s success is owed to luck, the default stance is often to implicitly ignore luck as a factor. I love that, because no one thinks luck doesn’t play a role in financial success. He answered, “The exact role of luck in successful outcomes.” Years ago I asked economist Robert Shiller the question. But it forces anyone you ask to think about what they intuitively think is true but don’t spend much time trying to answer because it’s futile. I like to ask people, “What do you want to know about investing that we can’t know?” Earned success and deserved failure fallacy: A tendency to underestimate the role of luck and risk, and a failure to recognize that luck and risk are different sides of the same coin. This report describes 20 flaws, biases, and causes of bad behavior I’ve seen pop up often when people deal with money.ġ. The finance industry talks too much about what to do, and not enough about what happens in your head when you try to do it. But that’s not how finance is typically taught or discussed.
Grace and Richard show that managing money isn’t necessarily about what you know it’s how you behave. Behavior is inborn, varies by person, is hard to measure, changes over time, and people are prone to deny its existence, especially when describing themselves. You can’t sum up behavior with formulas to memorize or spreadsheet models to follow. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. It’s the study of how people behave with money. That’s because investing is not the study of finance. Or building a faster chip than Apple’s engineers. In what other field does someone with no education, no relevant experience, no resources, and no connections vastly outperform someone with the best education, the most relevant experiences, the best resources and the best connections? There will never be a story of a Grace Groner performing heart surgery better than a Harvard-trained cardiologist. It’s to point out that there is no other field where these stories are even possible. The purpose of these stories is not to say you should be like Grace and avoid being like Richard.
The same year Grace Goner left a veritable fortune to charity, Richard stood before a bankruptcy judge and declared: “I have been devastated by the financial crisis … The only source of liquidity is whatever my wife is able to sell in terms of personal furnishings.” Fuscone was the opposite of Grace Groner educated at Harvard and University of Chicago, he became so successful in the investment industry that he retired in his 40s to “pursue personal and charitable interests.” But heavy borrowing and illiquid investments did him in. Richard Fuscone, former vice chairman of Merrill Lynch’s Latin America division, declared personal bankruptcy, fighting off foreclosure on two homes, one of which was nearly 20,000 square feet and had a $66,000 a month mortgage. Weeks after Grace died, an unrelated investing story hit the news. Grace took humble savings from a meager salary and enjoyed eighty years of hands-off compounding in the stock market. People who knew her asked: Where did Grace get all that money?īut there was no secret. That made the $7 million she left to charity after her death in 2010 at age 100 all the more confusing. She lived most of her life alone in a one-bedroom house and worked her whole career as a secretary. Let me tell you the story of two investors, neither of whom knew each other, but whose paths crossed in an interesting way.
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