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Here're some of the recent headlines - this is what insight really means.
Berkshire Hathaway B (BRK.B) Stock Declines While Market Improves: Some Information for Investors
Berkshire Hathaway B (BRK.B) Increases Despite Market Slip: Here's What You Need to Know Here is What to Know
...
These statements have continued, repeating with very little change, for more than 100 years. Their nature as truisms, with complete lack of meaning, despite their illusion of specificity, appear to be only getting worse. This is why many classic books on a subject as seemingly modern as finance, can remain so applicable no matter how many decades pass. The author, Fred Shrewd, or it might be, rather, Fred Schwed - who is in equal parts highly insightful and comical - in his 1940 book "Where are the Customer's Yachts?", wrote:
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Some statisticians have to write weekly or even daily market letters. This is a tough way to make a living. It not only requires the constant making of predictions, but it requires putting the predictions down on paper for anyone interested to check on. Sometimes these letters come back with a jug of mustard, and a forceful suggestion that the writer applies the mustard to his letter, and eat it. Statisticians of a nervous, sensitive, sort - after a few such experiences develop a prose style which would make a German 19th metaphysician envious. Here is a favourite clipped out of a Wall St Journal once, and that I have carried around proudly until it is almost as illegible as it is incomprehensible. The journal printed it under the questionable heading - market ideas:
"A leading Brokerage house says - during he slow rise from April lows which carried the Dow Jones Industrial Average from approximately 121 to the 139 level, the action of the market was regarded as in the nature of a technical recovery, with little thought of the imminence of dynamic action. Resistance, as expected was encountered just under 140, but after a 1 day decline, volume dwindled and the market presently appears to be engaged in a somewhat hazy consolidation movement, and perhaps searching for dynamic forces which will encourage broad gage buying and the resulting demolition of resistance barriers."
If the thoughtful reader will now read that statement backwards, he will discover that its original lucidity is not impaired. I have composed a guitar accompaniment to go with it, beginning with that mystic section 'and the market presently appears'. The piece is surprisingly effectively and will be used as the underlying motif in a forthcoming surrealist ballet.
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- Manlobbi
