Role of Luck in Investing
The subject of luck in investing is a fascinating one. MORGAN HOUSEL of Collaborative Fund once commented that luck and risk are the opposite sides of the same coin but we treat them very differently. Being a fan of his writings, I went through his views on “luck” and decided to reproduce a few them from 2017 to 2020. *What have you changed your mind about in the last decade? - 2017* I respect the role of luck more today than I did a decade ago. I used to view successful people as clearly having more intelligence and drive than others. I’ve come to appreciate how much of success is due to luck, not the least of which is being born into a good family in a good country. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that if Bill Gates were born in Berlin in 1920, his outcome would have been different. The common rebuttal to this is “Luck is what you’re dealt, fate is how you play your cards.” Which is 100% true. But some people are born with a pair of aces. Worse, they never reali...