mr_cash4 – I did NOT miss your point. And, Russell is NOT wrong. He’s probably one of the most respected financial newsletter editor, who has been in this business since 1950’s. He probably has more subscriber base than any newsletter writers. I’m sure for someone who has been through the Crash, the Great Depression, and WWII, his word of wisdom carries more value than ours.
One name came to mind – the legendary Jesse Livermore. He was probably one of the few who had actually made out “like a bandit’ in the 1929 crash. And I’ve not heard anyone claiming to be a better trader than the legend. But, Livermore died broke.
For me anyway, to be called GREAT, one has to perform at the highest level consistently over the long haul. As I’ve said, anyone can get lucky sometimes, but the Greats are the ones who do it all the time over their life time or their career. And for that definition of being GREAT, I know of no one. Perhaps you define greatness differently.
I agree with you. And what you’re saying is again “Theoretically” correct. But, in practice, we’re always winners as well as losers, depending on whether we made the right decision at the right time. As the saying goes: Don’t tell me what is going to happen, but tell me when it’s going to happen. And, that is the billion dollar question.
In addition, here’s an old article that I’ve kept on my computer. Stock market is NOT a zero sum game.
The zero-sum fallacy
by Brian Graney, the Motley Fool
Additionally, given the one-buyer, one-seller nature of a typical brokered transaction, there can be a tendency to assume that stock trading and the market on the whole is nothing more than a zero-sum game. In other words, in every trade one person wins while the other hapless soul loses. The person that ends up on the winning side of the trade more often than the losing side ends up making money in the market. This is another investor misperception.
In game theory, zero-sum describes a game where one player's gain is another player's loss and the total amount of the available desired element (money, poker chips, chess board squares, Hungry-Hungry Hippo balls, or whatever) is fixed. In an isolated example the result could over time appear to be zero-sum. If a company goes on to set the business world on fire and its stock price appreciates, the buyer certainly appears to be the winner with a capital gain at the expense of the seller, who incurs a loss in the form of a lost opportunity to make big money.
This thought process would work great if the stock market consisted of only fixed elements rather than a hodge-podge of variables, but it does not. In fact, hardly anything in the stock market as a whole is fixed. The size of the pot (or the market's total capitalization) can get bigger or smaller, depending on the number of investors involved and their changing willingness to commit funds to the market at any point in time.
Likewise, the number of companies in the market can increase or decrease as new companies come public or as existing companies go bust. Even the company itself can change the parameters of the game on a micro level by selling more shares or by buying in shares that it has previously issued. Both actions effectively change the availability of the desired element (its shares).
Investing is not horse racing
The existence of changing parameters drives a wedge in the argument that the stock market is nothing more than a giant pari-mutuel betting system, akin to the system that exists in horse racing. To be sure, there are some definite similarities between the track and the stock market. Perhaps the most obvious is the allure of the longshot in both, with the eternal search for the next Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) having much in common from a psychological standpoint with the desire of finding that winning pony with the 100-1 odds.
But the commonality of "swinging for the fences" strategies aside, the fact of the matter is that horse racing is a zero-sum game, with no real wealth created as each winner is simply paid out of the fixed pool of money that has been bet on each race. The stock market is a bit more complex than that, with wealth created not just by the supply and demand tug-of-war of the market itself but by the underlying value creation ability of the individual companies that make up the market.
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