Beware of Experts
AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, General Motors, the Dow Jones, the sub-prime crisis, and Stanford Financial Group. What do these all have in common? Answer: the experts all totally misread them, months or just days before they all imploded. Here’s Jon Stewart to take you on a guided tour.
This raises the point that we have a bit of a problem with not holding out stock and financial analysts accountable for their predictions. We reward them with attention for saying anything at all and then immediately forget who missed the mark and by how much.
Entrepreneurship is much less risky than stock trading when you keep this in mind. At least entrepreneurs control many of the levers of their fortune and can predict and mitigate many of the risks up front.