Flip through the pages of this august newspaper and you will often see reference to how particular investments are doing: gold is up, oil is down and the S&P 500 is going sideways.
Yet illuminating as all this might be, such reporting draws a veil across what we might call the Investor’s Tragedy: that the typical investor doesn’t do nearly as well as the typical investment.
This isn’t just because Wall Street and the City of London cream off all the money, although of course there is something in that. (In 1940, the author Fred Schwed invited us to contemplate the yachts of all the brokers and bankers riding at anchor off downtown Manhattan; the title of Schwed’s book was Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?)