Hard to tell

Ben’s “predictions” for 2018 are pretty damn good.

I liked the one below because I’ve seen so many examples of it in my time.

My colleague Kris and I were on the train home last night and we high-fived each other as Ethereum was breaking above $1100 per coin. Neither one of us can tell you the first thing about it, so we were cackling like escaped mental patients in the rain.

A scaled-down version of this takes place in the traditional markets every year. Here’s Ben with one his calls for this year:

You won’t be able to distinguish between luck and skill in anyone’s investment results. People will be right for the wrong reasons and wrong for the right reasons but markets don’t care about these things over shorter time frames. Over any given year a great process can produce subpar results while a terrible (or no) process can produce phenomenal results. Bad decisions get rewarded all the time but luck doesn’t last forever in the markets. Eventually a good decision-making process will win out but over a one-year time frame anything can happen.

The stuff that we get lucky with cannot be counted on to continue. But in the near-term, if we’re not careful, we can let these lucky breaks go to our heads, and thus have them be transformed into confidence in our own abilities. It’s hard to tell who deserved to make or lose money from the outside looking in. But from the inside, we’re more likely than not to harbor no such confusion. I nailed it.

It’s a mirage.

Source:

10 Things Investors Can Expect in 2018 (A Wealth Of Common Sense)