During this recent interview with The University of Chicago Booth School, Howard Marks quotes Galbraith saying there’s nothing intelligent to be learned about managing money. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Well, there’ll be a lot of things that you’ll learn in the investment business. then there’ll be a lot of things we… probably that we talk about today, which where I can’t tell you how. There is no how.
Who was it? John Kenneth Galbraith once said, “There’s nothing intelligent to be learned about managing money, because if there were, study would be intense and everybody with a positive IQ would be rich.”
I had a great day on Monday. I went up to West Point and spoke to a bunch of cadets there who were interested in finance, and who would’ve thought it?
But, this guy says to me, how do you know when to sell? What’s the right… What’s the amount where if it’s up, you sell? And what’s the amount where if it goes down you sell to prevent further losses?
I can’t tell you. Everything that you learn about making money, and certainly everything that you learn here about how to invest, it’s an intellectual framework.
It’s what to do. Nobody can tell you how to do it. And, you can try to sharpen your focus, and think about things in better and worse ways, but I created a concept called second level thinking, which is thinking different from the herd, deeper, hopefully more sophisticated, but also better.
If you think different, but worse, you don’t… you have a problem. So, second level thinking, you have to think different and better.
You can watch the entire discussion here:
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