The Hindu Business Line : Investment Nuggets

In the course of a remarkable professional career in investment management, Peter Bernstein has worn several hats. After starting his career as an economics professor, he became the Chief Executive of an investment counsel firm, managing billions of dollars for individual and institutional portfolios. In 1973, he resigned to launch Peter L Bernstein Inc. and in the following year became the first editor of The Journal of Portfolio Management, one of the most widely read investment journals. Author of Capital Ideas — The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street, Against the Gods — The Remarkable Story of Risk, and Power of Gold — The History of an obsession, his passion for the investment discipline remains undiminished.

"Financial markets are a kind of time machine that allows selling investors to compress the future into the present, and buying investors to stretch the present into the future."

"Investors refuse to believe that shock lies in wait... Investors do better where risk management is a conscious part of the process... survival is the only road to riches. You should try to maximise return only if losses would not threaten your survival...You don't want to blow it, because you don't get a second chance. When you invest, it's not your wealth today, but it's your future that you're really managing."

"The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: The notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature. Until human beings discovered a way across that boundary, the future was the mirror of the past or the murky domain of oracles and soothsayers who held a monopoly over knowledge of anticipated events."

"Games of chance must be distinguished from games in which skill makes a difference. The principles that work in roulette, dice, and slot machines are identical, but they explain only part of what is involved in poker, betting on the horses, and backgammon. With one group of games the outcome is determined by fate; with the other group, choice comes into play. The odds — the probability of winning — are all you need to know for betting in a game of chance, but you need far more information to predict who will win and who will lose when the outcome depends on skill as well as luck. There are cardplayers and racetrack bettors who are genuine professionals, but no one makes a successful profession out of Craps. Many observers consider the stock market itself little more than a gambling casino... Cards, coins, dice, and roulette wheels have no memory."

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