Abstract :
[en] “Invest smarter…” I started this project five years ago. After hundreds of hours of reading, thinking and writing, here they are: “All my Tweets on The Art & Science of Internet-Based Investing”, as most of them appear in my Twitter archive. My initial goal was to share my observations, analyses, and conclusions as to the evolution of the world and the behavior of the markets over a period of several years – which happened to correspond with the Presidency of Donald J. Trump. Also, I wanted to organize and illustrate the key heuristics that I learned, often painfully, as a modest investor. Needless to say that I never expected to experience a full-scale pandemic, and its accompanying episode of mass hysteria. A very real, and global, Black Swan!
My main conclusion today is that our world hasn’t changed that much over time. It’s almost like it was stuck in a “steady state”, or some kind of “eternal present”. Human beings continue to “lie, cheat and steal”… (US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo). De La Bruyère (1645-1696) was perfectly right in his “Characters”, and the observations of Erasmus (1467-1536) in “Praise of Folly” are more relevant than ever: “Let us not speak of the evil which man does to man: he ruins him, imprisons him, dishonors him, tortures him, sets traps for him, betrays him; to enumerate everything, with outrages, lawsuits, swindles, would be to count the grains of sand.”
So, I think that any investor could still succeed and prosper in today’s digital markets while following the advice of Henry Clews (1836-1923) in “Fifty Years in Wall Street”. As to me…, without a doubt, I am no Warren Buffett :-)! Feel free to disagree with what you will read in the following pages, and don’t hesitate to develop your own theory of investing as you allocate capital and observe results – a painful and solitary exercise. Success is at that price! Fortunately, based on what I achieved during these hectic years, it shouldn’t be hard for you to do better...
“Bon vent”… in the fog of the markets!