Yesterday I found myself reading GMO's latest quarterly letter and thinking, ‘wow, I'm fairly bearish but Jeremy Grantham just sounds like a grumpy old man!' Until I came upon this passage:

…you may think that I am particularly pessimistic. It is not true: It is all of you who are optimistic! Not only does our species have a strong predisposition to be optimistic (or bullish) – it is probably a useful survival characteristic – but we are particularly good at listening to agreeable data and avoiding unpleasant data that does not jibe with our beliefs or philosophies. Facts, whether backed by 97% of scientists as is the case with man-made climate change, or 99.9% as is the case with evolution, do not count for nearly as much as we used to believe. For that matter, we do a terrible job of planning for the long term, particularly in postponing gratification, and we are wickedly bad at dealing with the implications of compound math. All of this makes it easy for us to forget about the previously painful market busts; facilitates our pushing stocks and markets on occasion to levels that make no mathematical sense; and allows us, regrettably, to ignore the logic of finite resources and a deteriorating climate until the consequences are pushed up our short-term noses.

It immediately made me think of one of my favorite songs from The Who:

The shares crash, hopes are dashed.
People forget,
Forget they're hiding,
Behind an Eminence Front,
Eminence Front – it's a put on.

We are only a few years removed from one of the worst financial crashes in our history and investors have already put it out of their minds. Most importantly they have forgotten perhaps the greatest lesson of that time: overpay for a security and you are essentially taking much greater risk with the prospect of much reduced reward.

gmo's updated 7-year forecasts: pic.twitter.com/Mbmzmoj0sO

— Jesse Felder (@jessefelder) July 16, 2015