The Upside of Error and Misfortune

We are here in Lower Manhattan. It does not seem much like an “urban jungle.” It is too cold and rainy. After a brief excursion outside, you have to warm yourself by an artificial fire, with a coffee.

Or, after 7 p.m., with a glass of Jameson. Then the fog of the outside world clears long enough to think about “the hurtin'” and other philosophical puzzles. Nobody wants to be a-hurtin'. And nobody wants to own an asset in a sector that has the hurtin' on it. But that is usually the best thing to buy.

Man is not cut out to be a good investor. It goes against his basic instincts. At the end of a battle he wants to be still standing, like Caravaggio's David – a bloody sword in one hand and the head of Goliath in the other.

He wants to win. And he wants to own the team that just won the Super Bowl. The alternative, at least in his atavistic race memory, is death. But going with the winners is a recipe for losing in the perverse world of Wall Street, near where we pen these words.

The winners soon get as fat, stupid and overbought as a senator. The losers, meanwhile, are leaner, wiser and oversold. Error and misfortune are what you look for in a good investment.

Photo credit: PAULINO MORAN / flickr

Nietzsche's Logic

“That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger,” wrote Nietzsche. (We like to quote the great German thinker from time to time. It gives the Diary the pseudo-intellectual tone we are looking for. But we admit: We don't know how to spell his name. So we put in all the consonants you should need; reorganize them as you please.) [we hereby confirm the spelling is correct, PT]

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, thinking about his next devastating aphorism. After he had been sitting like this for a few years, the maid reportedly mistook him for a broom and tried to sweep the floor with him. Photo credit: Gustav Adolf Schultze