One of the attempted barbs tossed my way at various points in the past 20 years is “Cassandra.” Though I was often known as a leveraged “raging bull” before the late-1990’s bubble, and have regularly shifted to a constructive outlook after every bear market decline in more than 30 years as a professional investor, Cassandra’s name was called out at me approaching the bubble peaks of 2000, 2007, and again at the recent market highs. Frankly, I kind of like it.
See, in Greek mythology, Cassandra’s curse was not that her prophesies were incorrect. She understood her responsibility to defend others by sharing the future that she saw clearly. The curse was that nobody believed her until it was too late. When she warned that there were soldiers in the Trojan horse, the only person who believed her was silenced. As Robert E. Bell wrote, “her tragedy was knowing the unhappy truth and revealing it, something highly unwelcome then as now.”
Across three decades as a professional investor, we’ve always come out admirably over complete market cycles (with the clear exception of the speculative half-cycle since 2009). Even with recent challenges, we’ve never taken deeper loss during a complete market cycle than the S&P 500 has experienced. Still, the problem with recognizing the future is that one often seems wholly out-of-touch with the present. That was Cassandra’s problem too.
No comments:
Post a Comment