STREET DOGS
Don’t know, don’t care
When you don’t know enough, you’re better off not caring, writes Michel Pireu
From Jason Zweig: Accepting that you don’t know — and can’t know — what the future holds should be liberating, not frustrating. But you must also not care that you don’t know. If not being able to know the financial future bothers you, then you will never be at peace with your ignorance and you will live your investing life as a perpetual chase after the unobtainable. So, the single most important word, in the seven magic words "I don’t know, and I don’t care," is "and". Saying it is easy; meaning it is a lot harder. One functional definition of a bear market is that it is simply a period that separates the people who don’t care from those who merely say they don’t. The ones who thought they wouldn’t care, and then find to their own surprise that they do, almost never survive a bear market. The quality that the ancient Stoic philosophers called ataraxia (imperturbability) may well be the most important attribute the typical investor can cultivate. If you are a brilliant analyst who ...
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