Читать книгу Taming the Lion - Richard Farleigh - Страница 24

You may heed my early warnings that the markets are difficult and that the media underplays the difficulties, but you may also wonder about all the money made by the people working on Wall Street or in the City of London. Surely they know something about markets?

Let me put you straight on this. The truth is that very few are successfully backing their views on markets. Most of them wouldn’t have a clue what the market was going to do. They make money in other ways, such as commission and management fees.

It’s not that people working in finance don’t know anything – they are usually very good, very smart people. I respect a lot of them and many are my friends – but the fact is they’re making money out of sales, client relationships and by doing transactions, i.e. facilitating the whole process. They’re not actually making money out of successfully predicting what’s going to go up and down. They are, therefore, not a reason for you to take up punting cotton futures in your spare time.

Equally, don’t be too impressed with your stockbroker just because they sound confident and know a lot of stories and figures. More information does not necessarily make the market more predictable. The extra information is probably useless as the price has already adjusted for it - it has been ‘priced in’. It’s about as useful as playing roulette and knowing whether the roulette wheel was made in Taiwan or Korea. The critical test is: does the broker make a living out of picking stocks? Probably not. He or she is sitting in their seat because they’re getting the fees you pay them to buy and sell on your behalf. It’s very easy for someone to have a view when it’s with someone else’s money.