A Quote by James O'Shaughnessy

The average investor does significantly worse than a simple index... It's literally because of the way our brains are wired.

James O'Shaughnessy

Quote Topics

Average Because Brains Does Investor Literally Our Simple Than Way Wired Worse

Quote Author

James O'Shaughnessy
American - Businessman
Born: May 24, 1960

The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.

Daniel Kahneman

People are wired for lots of things. We're wired for novelty. We're wired for humor. We're wired for new pieces of information that surprise us in some way or add value to our lives. We're wired for fear.

Ramez Naam

If you look at English cricketers since the turn of the century, less than a handful have better records away from home than at home. So if everyone in our team is significantly worse away from home, the likelihood is the team as a whole will be significantly worse.

Andrew Strauss

The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.

Mark Twain

Nothing highlights better the continuing gap between rhetoric and substance in British financial services than the failure of providers here to emulate Jack Bogle's index fund success in the United States. Every professional in the City knows that index funds should be core building blocks in any long-term investor's portfolio. Since 1976, the Vanguard index funds has produced a compound annual return of 12 percent, better than three-quarters of its peer group.

Jonathan Davis

The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows the average man can see much better than he can think- Ladies' Home JournalI'd rather have two girls at seventeen than one at thirty-four

Fred Allen

It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Our standard prescription for the know-nothing investor with a long-term time horizon is a no-load index fund. I think that works better than relying on your stock broker. The people who are telling you to do something else are all being paid by commissions or fees. The result is that while index fund investing is becoming more and more popular, by and large it's not the individual investors that are doing it. It's the institutions.

Charlie Munger

Any man who goes into anything in life and does it better than the average will have a successful life. If he does it worse than the average, his life will not be successful. And no business can exist in which success cannot be won on that basis.

Charles M. Schwab

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.

Raymond Chandler

If you see voters as rational, you'll be a terrible politician. People are not wired to be rational. Our brains simply evolved to keep us alive. Brains did not evolve to give us truth. Brains merely give us movies in our minds that keeps us sane and motivated. But none of it is rational or true, except maybe sometimes by coincidence.

Scott Adams

Most relationships probably start with people going, 'Meh, it's probably best not to be embarking in this relationship.' We do it, though, because our brains are wired to make babies or whatever.

Paul Rust

I hate that our brains are wired that way. You don't remember the people that raved about us or just said something nice - I don't know why that's not in us to focus on *that*. But I think it takes a conscious effort to train our minds to change that.

Khloe Kardashian

Our approach has worked for us. Look at the fun we, our managers, and our shareholders are having. More people should copy us. It's not difficult, but it looks difficult because it's unconventional - it isn't the way things are normally done. We have low overhead, don't have quarterly goals and budgets or a standard personnel system, and our investing is much more concentrated than average. It's simple and common sense.

Charlie Munger

A decade ago, I really did believe that the average investor could do it himself. I was wrong. I've come to the sad conclusion that only a tiny minority, at most one percent, are capable of pulling it off. Heck, if Helen Young Hayes, Robert Sanborn, Julian Robertson, and the nation's largest pension funds can't get it right, what chance does John Q. Investor have?