
– Seth Klarman
Having a scientific understanding of the world is fundamentally about how you judge which information to trust.
People who are curious are going to be better investors and better stewards of others’ money. If there’s no curiosity, you’re basically doing something that’s already been done by someone else.
A scientist has a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplined imagination…the scientist explains the world by successive approximations.
As an investor, success can be defined by how much you make when you are right, less how much you lose when you are wrong. This means how often you are right or wrong does not matter very much in the end. Magnitude beats frequency.
I think it’s essential to remember that just about everything is cyclical. There’s little I’m certain of, but these things are true: Cycles always prevail eventually. Nothing goes in one direction forever. Trees don’t grow to the sky. Few things go to zero. And there’s little that’s as dangerous for investor health as insistence on extrapolating today’s events into the future.