Authority v. Tradition Is Central to Your Speculative Decisions

“Because we’ve always done it that way.”

Those are the words of someone likely to lose big–soon. Authority is not a wise foundation for speculative moneymaking decisions. Consider:

Appeal to authority is bad, but appeal to tradition is even worse. Experts aren’t infallible, but at least expertise is usually hard-won and retains some applicability over time. By contrast, tradition is often totally arbitrary or based on reasons that retain no relevance whatsoever. Also, an expert can issue a correction but tradition remains immutable and sacred (source: Jeff Darcy).

I would argue that almost all fundamental style investing falls into a category of tradition. Very few look for an alternative such as trend following. They figure that since it appears that everyone has invested or traded a certain way–that it must be the only way. They forget to dig deeper and forget to look for the truth behind why investing/trading works. Always searching for the “why?” is part of my February 25th presentation in Tokyo.

Filed under Trend Following