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“You are not as bright as you think you are. The human brain is not built to trade stocks.” – Never mind that the human brain is also not built to drive a car, play tennis or ride a bicycle. Those are all skills that could be learned.
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“This stock is already down 50% and it is a solid business. There is no way it can go below this level. If it does, the market is broken.” – just before the same stock drops another 30% and you panic and sell. If you don’t know why you are in stock, you won’t know when to exit, which means you will only sell when the price action scares you. Never say never and always have an exit plan.
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“There is no way this piece of crap stock could go any higher. It has already tripled in the past year” – just before it doubles again and squeeze all short-sellers.
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“This highly successful hedge fund billionaire is super-bearish. It is time to go 200% long and show him who’s smarter. “ – pick carefully your contrarian indicators. Some popular hedge fund managers are rich for a reason. They will not be right every time, no one is, but odds are that they know what they are doing.
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“Despite recent evidence of the opposite, Oprah’s, Hillary’s and Icahn’s tweets don’t move markets. They are an utter waste of time, garbage signals that mean nothing, but hey look at Fibonacci extensions of the moon cycle. I can’t believe more people are not paying attention to them.” – Technical and sentiment indicators work when enough people believe and act on them. None of them have 100% success rate. The success rate of all varies substantially depending on the market cycle.
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“Look, stock picking is too hard. Read my 1000 posts on why you are a terrible stock picker and why you should let me invest your money in a well-diversified equity index for 1% annual fee.”
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“This company missed estimates”. – Really!? Imagine if I try to guess the exact score of Superbowl and if I don’t end up being right to blame the teams that they missed my guess.
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“All VCs are greedy pigs because they keep great companies private for too long and don’t leave any profits for public investors.” – Never mind that many of those VCs took huge risks and have dedicated staff that actually helped those companies to become great. Never mind that probably 6 out of 10 of their investments will end up being zeros or that it it’ll take 7 to 10 years of waiting to see a payback.
