Rationality Quotes December 2013

Cyan

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

There are tens of thousands of professional money managers. Statistically, a handful of them have been successful by pure chance. Which ones? I don't know, but I bet a few are famous.

The market doesn't care how much you paid for a stock. Or your house. Or what you think is a "fair" price.

Professional investors have better information and faster computers than you do. You will never beat them short-term trading. Don't even try.

The book Where Are the Customers' Yachts? was written in 1940, and most still haven't figured out that financial advisors don't have their best interest at heart.

The low-cost index fund is one of the most useful financial inventions in history. Boring but beautiful.

Highlights from "50 Unfortunate Truths About Investing" by Morgan Housel.

The market doesn't care how much you paid for a stock....

This is virtually a verbatim quote something my father told me 30+ years ago.

5pianoforte61112y

More of the people reading this comment are likely to hire a financial advisor than try to become an investor. With that in mind I'd like to hear more about why financial advisors don't have our best interests at heart. I took a personal finance course in college that was 95% telling us how to create and execute financial plans and 5% telling us that in practice you should just hire a financial advisor. The former is to ensure that you know if your financial advisor knows what he's talking about. Is this actually bad advice?

5hyporational12y

I'd be interested in some guesstimations on how much luck it would take to be Warren Buffett, for example. Survivorship bias in finance is often employed as a just so story.