
Thursday Thoughts
An anonymous Tweet said “investing has absolutely nothing to do with investing anymore.... all that time and money spent on graduate school accounting, finance and math credits.... made totally worthless by TikTok and Reddit....damn shame when you think about it.”
Being a shame is one way to think about it but I take this as an upgrade to the challenges posed by participating in markets. One of the great things about capital markets is that you can continue to learn new things for your entire life. Embedded in that sentiment is that success hinges on the ability to adapt to new inputs like whatever the hell is going on with TikTok and Reddit, assessing their relevance or lack thereof and then figure out whether you are better off making changes or maybe recognizing when something is just noise for your investment process. TikTok and Reddit are noise for my process but maybe not yours, there’s no single correct answer for everyone.
If you think things like TikTok and Reddit are noise then the sentiment captured in that Tweet could also be a reinforcement for ergodicity; building a diversified and letting it do its thing for you. If you’re still in the accumulation phase, where will the stock market be 10 years from now? Will it double? Quite possibly. Will it only be up 50%? Also possible. If you make managing your portfolio a full time job for the next ten years how much outperformance will you add versus whatever outcome we get? Statistically speaking, you will underperform. You could just as easily underperform, putting in a fraction of the time realizing that the more important thing will be how much you add to your savings not whether you’re up 80% in a 75% decade.