The Washington Monthly

December 7, 2004

BEATING THE MARKET....This is off the beaten path, but Andrew Tobias has a good answer today to a perennial question: can smart investors beat the stock market?

Yes, you are likely smarter than most people....But you’re not competing with the 98% who may not have your gifts, but, in the main, with the 2% who do — and especially with a small subset of that group who have a lot of information at their disposal and perhaps more time and training than you. (And still they — too — tend not to be able to beat the market.)

This is something that too few smart people appreciate: in most things that matter, you're not competing with the whole world. You're competing with a tiny subset of the world that's probably at least as smart and knowledgable as you — and probably more so. Caveat emptor.

—Kevin Drum 2:10 PM Permalink | Trackbacks

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