Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio
The Four Pillars of Investing by William J. Bernstein is a comprehensive guide to investing, covering essential concepts like asset allocation, market history, and behavioral finance. It provides practical advice for building a successful long-term investment strategy.
Mastering financial history is absolutely critical for investment success. The same speculative manias, bubbles, panics and crashes have repeated again and again over history, about once a generation. Even if you completely understand theory and psychology, you will still fail as an investor without learning from the past's follies.
Let’s start, then, by turning to economic history and seeing if we can discern some trends.
At its core, technological innovation drives productivity gains, economic growth, and rising prosperity. It is the great engine behind long-term stock market returns. But it's not the absolute level of innovation that matters – it's the rate of progress. If innovation halted suddenly, corporate profits and stocks would fluctuate but cease rising over time.
Importantly, technological progress does not follow a steady, accelerating pace. It comes in intense bursts and blooms. The explosion from 1820 to 1850 was likely the most profound ever. In just 30 years, transportation speeds increased tenfold via railroads. Near-instant communication emerged thanks to the telegraph. The costs of travel and exchanging information plummeted dramatically. Life changed profoundly for people at all levels of society in ways difficult to grasp today. Just a few decades prior, nothing moved faster than a galloping horse. The very nature of time and distance was transformed within a generation.
Consider a useful analogy: technology's diffusion into the economy is like water from an old hand pump. The spurting, irregular flow at the pump handle represents innovation. But the steady stream at the pipe's end is consumption by the average consumer. Capital allocation between these two points is what drives investment returns.
Fascinatingly, investing in pioneering new technologies has yielded low returns historically. Early investors in automobiles and radio companies, for example, got poor results despite backing influential inventions. What matters isn’t so much the merit of the product itself, but the enthusiasm of the public – that’s what drives capital allocation.
Enthusiasm occurs in brief bouts, though. It’s during these short waves of public excitement that era-defining industries get capitalized and towering companies emerge. In the absence of such enthusiasm, investors who provide capital for unproven technologies mostly achieve disappointing returns.
In other words, path-breaking inventions only succeed in those historically rare cases where they happen to catch the attention and enthusiasm of the public.
The Four Pillars of Investing (2002) presents an accessible, evidence-based approach to investing success. The book examines how avoiding emotional biases and impulsive actions enables harnessing the market's wealth-generating power. Bernstein argues that integrating insights from financial science, psychology, and history offers individual investors their best chance at building lifelong prosperity.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
