Читать книгу Starting With Shares - Roger Kinsky - Страница 13

You might think that the more you learn about shares, the better you'll be able to predict how the market or a particular share will perform. A friend of mine who's knowledgeable about shares recently told me he had sold all his shares because he was sure that after the market recovered from the downturns caused by the COVID‐19 pandemic, it would dive again. Guess what? The market kept rising and reached new heights.

The sharemarket is difficult to predict basically because people buy and sell shares and it's very difficult to predict how a person will react in a certain situation. So imagine the difficulty in trying to predict how thousands will react to situations on the sharemarket that change all the time. Another complicating factor is that people have an instinctive tendency towards ‘herd’ behaviour, ingrained over thousands of years of human evolution. This instinct tends to make them want to take safety in numbers and ‘follow the leader’ — so just a few people acting in a certain way can influence others to also act in the same way. Different strategies can work in different situations, and no one strategy works well in all situations. No ‘magic bullet’ exists with shares. Ignore anyone — including a respected share authority or advisor — who tells you they have a system with shares that succeeds in all situations. Especially walk away if they want you to part with a sizeable heap of your hard‐earned money to gain access to this super‐duper system.

You might argue that computers can be programmed to trade shares and computers don't make mistakes. That's true but the fact that computers don't make mistakes doesn't mean they can predict the future with any degree of certainty. Computers need programs and those programs have to be written by a person. They will reflect the programmer's preferences and experiences and, therefore, still operate with in‐built biases.