Odd Lots - Even The World's Greatest Investors Have Made Horrible Mistakes

Episode Date: July 30, 2018

Here's some good news for investors: If you've ever made a disastrous trade, you're not alone. All of the greats have made horrible moves as well. On this week's Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Michael ...Batnick, the director of research at Ritholtz Wealth Management, and the author of a new book 'Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments.' We talk about great errors from the likes of Warren Buffett, Bill Ackman, Jesse Livermore and many others. In addition to going through their blunders, Batnick explains some basic lessons that investors can take away from these going forward in their own money moves.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:47 Listen on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, and wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, and welcome to another episode of the Obloss podcast. I'm Joe Wisenlaw.
Starting point is 00:01:24 And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, we talk a lot. I don't know, I guess if we talk a lot on this particular podcast, but I would say financial media is very into great investments and legendary investors and how they got there and how basically a whole industry devoted to, you know, how people became rich and successful. Wouldn't you say that? Yeah, well, you have to have role models if you're trying to do something, right? And definitely investors tend to lionize certain people.
Starting point is 00:01:57 I mean, Warren Buffett is probably the most famous investor that springs to mind. And every year, you get people who go down to Omaha and it turns into sort of a Warren Buffett fest, I would say. Right. And then not only do we sort of lionize these people, but also throughout the year at any given time, if they make a call, you have people who want to jump on that call. Like if Warren Buffett adds a new position to his portfolio, then of course you'll get a typically you see buying of that stock the next day because people think, well, if Warren Buffett is invested in it or any one of these other gurus, so to speak, is invested in it, then you get people trying to follow on and think that their riches and genius will spread to them. Yeah, lots of follow.
Starting point is 00:02:46 for sure. You even have some people now who've basically made a business out of following financial gurus and it's called copy trading. So you have followers of followers. It's followers all the way down. But the one thing we don't talk about as much is the fact that all these people are human and in fact, a lot of them have made some pretty huge mistakes in their career. Warren Buffett's made mistakes? No. I don't know if Warren Buffett has actually ever made a mistake. It's possible that he is bad at a thousand. But most investors, even the really great ones, I believe, have made a couple of mistakes here and there. Right. And you're absolutely correct that we don't hear that much about those mistakes. Maybe for obvious reasons, but I'm guessing there are probably a lot of lessons you could learn about investing from actually talking about what went wrong.
Starting point is 00:03:35 There are definitely lessons you could learn. And we're going to learn some of those lessons today. And I think just for your and I's sake, I think we should redouble our ever. for it to point out mistakes because you and I are in the position to always be reporting on people's calls and people's position changes and their forecasts and stuff like that. And we should just, you know, as like a sort of note to each other, remind each other to go back and look and see who got it wrong the year before, just to keep everyone more honest. No, you're absolutely right. Especially on the sell side, we have a whole industry of people who are supposed to be making calls and a lot of those are incorrect and you're absolutely right that we don't do enough to point those out.
Starting point is 00:04:14 I got to admit, Joe, I have a few investing mistakes of my own that I'm pretty embarrassed, but maybe we'll talk about them during this episode. I'm really curious about them now. No, they're so embarrassing. All right. We definitely have to bring them up. All right. Well, maybe we can avoid our mistakes, or maybe we can avoid making investing mistakes if we learned about the big mistakes that famous investors have made. And to this end, our guest today is Michael Battenick. He is the Director of Research at Ridhol's Wealth Management.
Starting point is 00:04:46 And he has a new book out that came out this year entitled Big Mistakes, the Best Investors in Their Worst Investment. So this should be really fun because we're going to talk about great investors and their colossal errors. Michael, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Why did you write this book about famous investors screwing up? Well, the best advice I got on writing a book was write something that you would want to read.
Starting point is 00:05:21 And this definitely fit that bill. So there are a bazillion how-to books. So I wanted to take the opposite side. And maybe that's the wrong way of putting it because this is not a how not to book. This is just a book on, to your point, we do lionize these best investors, but they are human too. And investing is really hard. And I don't care what style you're doing, how big a dollar pool you're managing.
Starting point is 00:05:43 It is really hard. And it's not about avoiding mistakes. I mean, there are certain mistakes that are easily avoidable, for instance, do not buy and hold a triple levered, you know, ETF, don't do that. That we can avoid. But Jesse Livermore said something along the lines of the mistake family is so large that you think you've made it all, then, you know, one is right around the corner. So you're going to make mistakes. Whatever you're doing, if you're buying a hold, I mean, whatever you are doing, you're going to make mistakes. So the point of this book was that maybe after reading this, you will have a little bit of empathy
Starting point is 00:06:11 for your future self. When you do make a mistake, don't go off the reservation. Don't beat yourself up. Just take it and try to move along. So, Michael, I'm really curious how you actually went about researching this book. Because as Joe and I were discussing, you know, these are things, mistakes, errors that people generally don't like to talk about and that certainly aren't as well publicized as their successes. Yeah, so a lot of this stuff is public. I didn't speak to any of the individual investors because it was all out there. A lot of it, people have written about, people have spoken about. Of course, like John Paulson's recent struggles are very public.
Starting point is 00:06:47 Einhorn's recent struggles, Ackman's recent struggles. So I think we have a lot more access to information than we would have in the past. We were joking earlier that maybe Warren Buffett had never made a mistake, but of course he has made mistakes and you wrote about Warren Buffett in your book.
Starting point is 00:06:59 So what was Warren Buffett's biggest mistake? Not only did Warren Buffett make mistakes, but there was plenty to choose from. It wasn't like I had to search very difficult, very hard for this one. So the biggest mistake that he would say is that he bought a shoe company called Dexter's shoe.
Starting point is 00:07:14 I think it was a small company in Maine that got destroyed by overseas competition. But the mistake was not that he bought this company. The mistake was that he bought it with stock. And he paid something like 350 or 400 million or something like that. And that is now worth $7 billion. That's a bowling company. I used to own a pair of Dexter.
Starting point is 00:07:33 I just want to get this in there. I used to own a pair of Dexter shoes, by the way. I don't know what happened to them. All right, keep going. Well, so, yeah. So in that particular mistake, that is not something that any of us are not going to replicate because none of us are going to have the opportunity to buy a company with shares in our own company. The point is, if Warren Buffett makes mistakes and he's made plenty of them, be very careful about being overconfident in your own abilities.
Starting point is 00:07:57 Michael, as you point out, like, none of us own a Berkshire Hathaway that we could even buy a company with in our own stock. Like, that is not something that we're going to replicate? But is there a generalizable error from there? Is there a lesson from that Buffett mistake that the average investor could, apply? Oh, certainly. So this was the availability bias. He had purchased another shoe manufacturer company that did extraordinarily well for him. And he said, well, that one did well. This one will do well. And people make these parallels all the time. I mean, this obviously, there was a logical step. This is a shoe company. That's a shoe company. But people make comparisons all the time,
Starting point is 00:08:35 just something that pops easily into their brain that has no business being compared with something else. But there are a lot of mistakes are easily avoidable. As for instance, what Bill Ackman did is very easily avoidable. Do not talk to friends and family about your newest stock pick. And if you do talk to them and if you do pound the table, give yourself an out. Say, hey, I really, you know, if somebody asked, I really like the stock X, Y, C, at 100. Which one are you referring to? So Bill Ackman, the mistake that I highlighted in the book, of course, there was, you know, like everybody else, there was multiple mistakes to choose from. I went with Herbalife. How can anybody give a four-hour presentation, honestly?
Starting point is 00:09:15 stock and then say, hey, you know what? I forget everything I said last week. I changed my mind. Right? So I think it's really easy to just avoid that. Just don't talk about your positions in public, especially not to your friends and family because we are loath to change our mind. But like I said, if you do talk about it, at least give yourself an out. Don't get married to a position. Michael, I kind of think when it comes to investing, there's two very generalized broad bucket mistakes that you can think of. And one has to be making a bad investment that loses money and the other one has to be missing out on a good investment. Do you have any famous examples of either of those?
Starting point is 00:09:49 And on the whole, which one is more common for the people that you surveyed? Hmm. This is a good question. So I think the unforced errors are probably more common. But I have never had anybody say to me, hey, Michael, I got a stock tip. The thing quintupled, now what do I do? Right? Like, it's never that.
Starting point is 00:10:08 It's always, hey, somebody gave me a stock tip. I've down 30%. What do I do now? So the unforced errors in terms of watching something go up without you is really hard to insulate ourselves from. I'm not really sure. I don't really have a good suggestion of how to like protect yourself from yourself. And as an example, Stanley Druckenmiller, who literally has like a top three track record of all time, bought a stock. I think it was called Veracine in late 90s.
Starting point is 00:10:33 He had terrible FOMO. And it showed him a profit, of course. And then he doubled down. And then it went like the market topped the very next day. And I think he lost like $3 billion in six weeks. And it basically, he said no mace. He set him out. So he got swept away with the phone of the late 90s.
Starting point is 00:10:49 We just saw the same thing with Bitcoin recently. It is very, very difficult to watch people make money when you're not. Let's talk about some of these psychological errors. You mentioned the famous trader, Jesse Livermore, earlier. And I read his book a couple of years ago. And he, you know, he sort of prized himself on his risk management abilities. But even he would then somehow get in these, like, horrible. ruts where he broke all of his own risk management rules and he would double and triple down on
Starting point is 00:11:16 losing investments. Even when he knew that that was the worst thing you could possibly do, I think there was like some cotton trade or something like that that totally destroyed him. Are there examples in your book of investors who just like, they just blow through all of their own rules and risk management approaches and destroy themselves? Well, he is the prime example. He made several fortunes and lost them all, and the one that really did him in was he was short the market in the Great Depression, and I think he made $100 million. And $100 million, I mean, that's a lot of money in 1929, a decent amount today. But he went, so he flipped and he went bullish a little bit too early in 1931 or something like that, and he got destroyed. And every time that
Starting point is 00:12:00 he made and lost a fortune, he came away with these like remarkably eloquent sayings about the market. And he is probably the single most quoted trader. today. And the irony is that he couldn't even follow his own rules, not even close. And he got blown up a bazillion times. And at the end, he took his own life because there were structural changes in the market with the SEC coming in. And he just couldn't do what he used to do. And yeah. So Joe mentioned the human psychology. How many of these big mistakes are driven by human error? And, you know, if that's the case, then is the major lesson just that we should write down some tried and tested rules and, you know, have them sort of set in stone and never deviate from
Starting point is 00:12:44 them and maybe we should have machines run our training portfolios or people completely devoid of emotion. Is that the takeaway? Well, it's hard to give such broad advice like that, but like I said, insulating yourself from the fear of missing out, I just don't have a good answer. And another example is Jack Bogle. So he took over the Wellington Fund, which is one of the oldest mutual fund companies in the country. And he basically, basically ran into the ground because in the late 60s during the go-go years, the name of the game was high turnover, rapid trading. And the Wellington Fund, which prided itself in being conservative and surviving the Great Depression and a balanced portfolio, he hired some hot shots from Boston to keep up with what everyone else was doing. He even had a mutual fund that was based on technical analysis.
Starting point is 00:13:33 So Jack Bogle was infected with a fear of missing out, Stanley Drucken Miller was. it's really difficult. And these psychological things, I mean, I don't know if machines are necessarily the answer. I think that one thing that all of us can do is write things down. Like when you go into a trade, write things down. And so I did this. And this was not intentional at the time, but I kept a trading diary or journal of what I was doing. And I would go back and look at it.
Starting point is 00:13:59 And it sounded so ridiculous. And but it was my words. Like I couldn't blame anybody else. It was me. I was ridiculous. And so that was a really good. way to protect myself from being sort of self-delusional. If these are my thoughts yesterday, what are my thoughts going to be tomorrow? So it was a game that I just, I just stopped playing entirely.
Starting point is 00:14:16 Michael, you're on Twitter and you obviously have been involved with finance Twitter and trading Twitter for a really long time. Do you think that Twitter can exacerbate what you described with like Bill Ackman, where someone comes up with a public view or a public persona or a public stands on a stock, and then that causes them to get overly locked into a position. And I don't even necessarily mean on a stock. Maybe someone has a reputation for being bullish or bearish on some idea and that Twitter can have the effect of making it harder for people to change their mind. Of course it does, because the thought process and the way the sausage is made when trades are put on and taken off, it's not pretty. And so when you allow people to see that, it looks ridiculous.
Starting point is 00:15:02 And now some people have made a career out of that. Like, as if, for instance, Paul Tudor Jones famously circulated the analog chart on 1987 to 1929. And now we see those 87 analog charts all the time. Right? So we laugh at that stuff now. But that was like his thesis. And he was using, he's a very big proponent or was of Elliott Wave analysis. And if we saw somebody doing that in public, we would sort of laugh at them.
Starting point is 00:15:28 Or at least I would. So I think that putting your views out into the public can be really really. Really, really dangerous, really dangerous. And I think that just Twitter in general just gives a very warped sense of the world because you could see all these bozos and you think, oh, I'm trading against them. Like, of course I have an edge against these people. But Jim Simons is not on Twitter, right? Like Ken Griffin, he's not on Twitter. So these are the people you're competing against, but you don't really see them.
Starting point is 00:15:51 You see the people that are on Twitter all day long. I'm Francine Lacquois, an award-winning journalist. And I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from heads of state to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious who are these people as leaders. I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday.
Starting point is 00:16:21 Follow leaders with Francine Lacroix wherever you get your podcasts. So what's the motivation for going public with a trade? because if I was being very cynical and remember Joe urged me to be more cynical at the beginning of this discussion, but I would say these people want other people to follow them into the trade to inflate whatever stock or asset it is that they are buying and or betting against. Well, the funny thing is, and I have no way of proving this, but I just suspect that a lot of the people that talk about positions publicly don't even have them, like don't even have skin in the game. They're just talking about it. And people would almost rather like, hey, good trade man, is. almost better than making money,
Starting point is 00:16:59 which is just, I think people are just in it for the ego. And so I think what is the, why would somebody put themselves out there? Well, if you're wrong, people forget. And if you're right, like it's an asymmetric trade. If you're right on a really big oil trade or whatever, that can make your career, right?
Starting point is 00:17:16 We see people that are living off of one big trade. So why wouldn't you put it out there? Do you think that the pressures and the types of errors people make are different for, individual investors versus, say, someone who manages money. And I'm thinking about the effect that if you manage money, you might get a situation in which all your clients are calling up. It's like, wait, why aren't you in tech stocks or why aren't you in Bitcoin or whatever? And if you're missing out
Starting point is 00:17:44 for a few quarters, you can suddenly see AUM start to flee. Whereas if you're an individual, you know, you might miss out, but no one is breathing down your neck or threatening to yank their money. Great point. I think that's one of the individual investors. biggest advantages. So when John Paulson put on this trade, he had investors like... What Paulson trade are we talking about now? So when he's short of the housing market, his investors were like, are you nuts? What do you think you know that Morgan Stanley doesn't know? So I can only imagine the pressures that he was facing. And Michael Barry, too, in the movie, The Big Short and the book, of course, I think Joel Greenblatt tried to like take his money out and
Starting point is 00:18:21 maybe even sued him, if I'm remembering the story correctly. So there are all sorts of pressures when you're managing money. If you have a client leave for a specific reason and then you have a second client leave for the same reason, how could you not say, hey, wait a minute, maybe this is just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe I would lose all my clients. Maybe I better unwind this trade,
Starting point is 00:18:39 even if it's the right thing to have on. So I think that that adds a whole other layer of complexity. Like look at the position that Einhorn is in right now. How could he not be affected? How could he continue to be objective when he's in the journal and all these articles are being written about him? I think that makes it enormously difficult. To this point, how do you figure out if you make a mistake?
Starting point is 00:19:01 You know, one of your investments goes parashaped or you miss out on something. How do you determine whether or not it's the market that's right or whether you're right? Am I explaining this? Well, I'm probably not. Yeah, well, so mistakes mean different things to different people. Like sitting through a 35% decline in the SP500 could be disciplined to one person, but that could be a mistake to somebody else, where a selling could be a mistake to the person
Starting point is 00:19:28 who thought they were being disciplined. So the mistake, fam, like I said, like Justy Livermore said, mistakes mean different things to different people. But wait, what was the question? Okay, the question is, if you're watching the market, let's take Bitcoin as an example, right?
Starting point is 00:19:43 And you see it go up, you know, 300% in the space of a few months or a few years or whatever. But you are absolutely convinced that Bitcoin eventually is going to fall apart, but you miss out on it in the interim, and eventually, you know, five years later, it does fall apart. Have you made a mistake or were you vindicated? And how much of these decisions are dependent on market timing? And how are you assigning blame or credit either to the investor or to the wider market?
Starting point is 00:20:09 We're never wrong, just early. So Adam Smith wrote about this. His name was George Goodman, not really Adam Smith, in The Money Game, which is my favorite book ever written on investing. And he talks about just the psychology of yourself versus the market. So I don't know that I have a good answer to how do you know if it's a mistake? Because like I said, mistakes are different things to different people. But the market will ultimately, I mean, the market is the ultimate decision maker. So it's different time frames and different objectives and different things to different people.
Starting point is 00:20:39 So I don't know that there is a aha, now I'm wrong. Now I made a mistake type of thing. Let's like do a rapid fire discussion of some of the mistakes in your book. So looking at the, you have John Maynard Keynes, who everyone knows in a. economist. He also traded. What was his big mistake? So his mistake turned out to be an amazing lesson. So the idea there was that he basically wrote the modern monetary system and was the father of macroeconomics investing. And he tried to apply that sort of analysis. Hey, what do interest rates in Great Britain do to the currency in Argentina? And then what does that do to stocks in Bolivia
Starting point is 00:21:15 and whatever? And so he tried to do that and he got destroyed like everybody else did during the Great depression. And he totally did a 180 and became a bottoms up value investor. So that was a really, really interesting chapter to read about and to write. And you start out with Benjamin Graham as well, the father of value investing. What could he possibly have done wrong? So he was very conservative going into the crash of 29. I think he had like, you know, a decent amount of cash and preferred stocks or whatever. But he went in too early. He thought that stocks were incredibly cheap, and they were, but they got incredibly cheaper. And so the takeaway for the average reader, and we're all average, so the takeaway for the reader, is that be very careful. There are limits
Starting point is 00:22:05 to value investing. Just because something is cheap does not mean that it's not cheap for a good reason. Does that mean that it's not going to, you know, some of these training had a multiple of four times earnings? It's probably a good reason. It doesn't mean that that can't contract even further. this actually sort of comes around to Tracy's earlier question about how do you actually know when something is a mistake. And I guess my question with Benjamin Graham is, did he make an analytical error? Because he's considered to be a great investor. He's the father of value investing, literally wrote the book on it. I think he's a mentor to Warren Buffett. Is that right? Yeah, he was his teacher at Columbia. Yeah, he was his teacher at Columbia. Did he violate some rule of his
Starting point is 00:22:44 zone or anything, or is it just bad timing? No, no, he didn't make a mistake. The point was out is that there are limits to value, right? Like, things that look extraordinarily expensive can triple in price and things that look extraordinarily cheap can still get cut in half. And there was another trap in the book where a mistake wasn't necessarily made, but there was just a takeaway for the reader. So Charlie Munger got crushed.
Starting point is 00:23:06 He had a really concentrated position in this company called Blue Chip Stamps. Now, that wasn't a mistake. It was the 73, 74 bear market. Everybody got cut in half. The point was of that. was that everybody gets crushed sometimes. So there are just market environments which you will not win. Right.
Starting point is 00:23:20 So it's not necessarily that Munger made a mistake in that chapter or that Ben Graham made a mistake buying stocks in 1931. It's that stuff happens. So you mentioned Jesse Livermore, who obviously didn't really recover from his mistakes. But the vast majority of the investors that you're talking about in your book did bounce back. How were they able to do that? How did they overcome the reputational issues surrounding getting something really, really wrong? Survivorship bias. And I say that I only have joking.
Starting point is 00:23:53 But the truth is, like, I don't have a great answer to why did these particular people bounce back? Because certainly a lot more investors did not bounce back after they had difficult periods of time. So I would say that there's a lot of combinations of luck, of skill, of perseverance, of mental fortitude, you know, all this sort of cliches. Do you have any, I mean, you see clients at your firm who have probably come. with busted portfolios and stuff like that. Do you have any sort of lessons that you've learned on sort of like how to come back in general? How for the average reader or the average listener this podcast, after taking a huge blow, how to sort of regroup and reset?
Starting point is 00:24:30 The important thing is that you put yourself in a position to not experience a huge blow because I think coming back from it is supremely difficult. We blame the market. We say, oh, just my luck that I'll do this and then the market will do that. So there's easy ways to avoid that. I have no problem with picking stocks and timing the market as a hobby with a small portion of your money because it is a lot of fun. But if you're going to do it, do it with 5% of your portfolio max or something like that. Don't put yourself in a position to be a four-seller because if you take a 60% blow to your overall, there is no coming back from that.
Starting point is 00:25:03 You will have developed such mental scar tissue and animosity towards the market that you will never be objective again. I feel like if you take 5% of your money and trade it or try to market time or pick individual stocks, the worst thing that could probably happen is that you do really well in that 5%. Yeah, why 5%. It should be 20%. Yeah, it's like, oh, I better up to this. Yeah, well, the good news is that's not likely for most people. And I also think another reason why trading is a good idea. It's because it's a constant reminder of how difficult an opponent the market is.
Starting point is 00:25:35 And I think that's really the main takeaway from this book is, for goodness sakes, how can you invest, trade, whatever you're doing, and not be humbled? Like, how can you really think that you have an edge? Like, come on. It is so difficult, and there is constant feedback, and typically you're not winning. So to continue to try and adapt or solve the puzzle, it is not solvable. So I'm not saying don't trade and don't have fun, but be responsible. Should we even try to outperform the market in that case? I don't think it's a terrible goal considering the fact that you're probably not going to, and it's going to be a nice reminder of why you shouldn't try to outperform the market. One more I'm curious about Chris Saka, you wrote about in your book, and I think he's just a private company tech investor, right?
Starting point is 00:26:21 Yeah. So just one last thing, Tracy, just in terms of outperforming the market is insanely difficult, but I think people underestimate how hard it is to even keep up with the market. Now, as far as Chris Saka goes, yes, he allegedly has the most successful venture capital fund of all time. He was a huge investor in Twitter and one of the earliest investors in Uber, like all the unicorns, basically he was there. Now, there were things that he passed on and there were some really giant misses that he passed on. And three of those were Airbnb, Snapchat and Dropbox, three of the biggest, I think they're all still private companies. So the point with that is, like even the most successful private investor of all time said no to these three companies. He had an opportunity and he said, thanks, but no thanks. So you're not going to invest in everything that's going up.
Starting point is 00:27:12 I mean, stating the obvious, there will always be something, there will always be a distraction out there, whether it's Bitcoin or the Ebola stocks in 2014 or whatever it is. Like, there will always be something that is going parabolic that you're just not investing in and deal with it. Well, on that note, Michael, I think deal with it is the perfect way to end our conversation. Thank you very much for joining. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks, Tracy. Thanks, Michael.
Starting point is 00:27:36 That was great. So Tracy, are you going to tell us what your big disastrous investment was? No, I'm going to deflect to another aspect of my personal life and just tell you something that's tangentially related to Michael's last point. And we were talking about whether or not the market is wrong versus the actual investor. So many, many years ago, my uncle who lives in Austria and has a retail business got offered the sale rights for Crocs in Europe. Do you remember Crocs? Oh. The shoes.
Starting point is 00:28:19 Yeah, of course. Yeah, they still exist. Yeah, yeah. But I remember when they were a huge craze. They were a massive craze. But anyway, this was before then. He turned them down specifically on the basis that he thought the shoes were ugly. So he missed out on millions, Joe.
Starting point is 00:28:34 And clearly, you know, was he wrong about Crocs being ugly? I would say no. Yeah, he wasn't wrong. He was just early. Yeah, exactly. To use a traitor cliche. I really like that conversation, particularly that point about just how hard it is to beat the market. So obviously, famous investors make mistakes, and there are probably some generalizable lessons about the psychology of mistakes and violating your own rules and all kinds of stuff like that.
Starting point is 00:29:05 But just that point that you're going to lose. If you try to win, you're almost certainly going to lose. Everybody loses at times. and the idea of beating the market for almost everyone is a massive fool's errand. Yeah, well, not just that, but Michael made the point that it's difficult even to keep up with the market. And that is something that I think a lot of people underappreciate. And actually, on that note, I do have an anecdote from my personal investing history, which, by the way, is not extensive at all and took place before I joined Bloomberg.
Starting point is 00:29:38 But many, many years ago, you know, I invested in a dividend fund thinking, this was a short bet at the time and dividend equities are safe. It should be fairly straightforward. And a couple months into it, the guy that had been running the fund for decades and making a good success of it stepped down and the stock immediately plunged about 10 or 20 percent, something outrageous like that. Oh, man. So that gives you an example. You had the right idea. You had the right idea. Dividends, you know, is a good thesis. And so the fact that you avoided this key man risk in the fund, though, damn. I'm sorry, Tracy. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. Anyway, I have many, many more examples of things that went wrong in my personal portfolio. All right. Well, that's actually a good excuse to wrap
Starting point is 00:30:23 things up here so that we can get to me and you chatting off the recording and you can tell me more of your stories. Yeah, you're right, Joe. Okay, let's leave it there. Let's continue this conversation offline. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allo. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Wisenthall. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. And you should follow our guest, Michael Batnik, the author of The Best Investors in Their Worst Investments on Twitter at Michael Batnick. And follow our producer, Tofer Forges at Forges T, as well as the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca today. Thanks for listening. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy
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