Timeless Thoughts on Investing

I was recently re-reading an older book, The Money Game, by “Adam Smith”, and I came across a very poignant passage that I thought I should share. This book was written in 1967, and it is a very interesting take on money and how we view it.

The passage relates to how we perceive investments in general, as well as the importance of having a goal for your investments and saving activities. Keep in mind that this passage was written more than 55 years ago, so some references will be woefully out of date, but the message is still clear and valid. Let me know if it gives you inspiration – I thought it was particularly good:

A stock is, for all practical purposes, a piece of paper that sits in a bank vault. Most likely you will never see it. It may or may not have an Intrinsic Value; what it is worth on any given day depends on the confluence of buyers and sellers that day. The most important thing to realize is simplistic: The stock doesn’t know you own it. All those marvelous things, or those terrible things, that you feel about a stock, or a list of stocks, or an amount of money represented by a list of stocks, all of those things are unreciprocated by the stock or the group of stocks. You can be in love if you want to, but that piece of paper doesn’t love you, and unreciprocated love can turn into masochism, narcissism, or, even worse, market losses and unreciprocated hate.

It may sound a little silly to have a reminder saying The Stock Doesn’t Know You Own It were it not for all the identity fuel provided by the market these days. You could almost sell these identities as buttons: I Am the Owner of IBM, My Stocks Are Up 80 Percent; Flying Tiger Has Been So Good to Me I love It; You All Laughed When I Bought Solitron and Look at Me Now.

Then there is a great big master button called I Am a Millionaire, or I Am So Shrewd My Portfolio Has Gone into Seven Figures. The magic of this million-dollar number, and of its accessibility to Everyman, is so great that books sell with titles like How I Made A Million or You Can Make Millions, with very little content at all. They are the most dangerous of all the things written on the market because (and I collect them as a hobby) inevitably there is some mechanical formula somewhere within. Never mind who you are or what your capacities and abilities are, just charge in with the book open to chapter three.

If you know that the stock doesn’t know you own it, you are ahead of the game. You are ahead because you can change your mind and your actions without regard to what you did or thought yesterday; you can, as Mister Johnson said, start out with no preconceived notions. Every day is a new day, providing, in the Game, a new set of continuously measurable options. You can live up to all those old market saws, you can cut your losses and let your profits run, and it doesn’t even make your scar tissue itch because, being selfless, you are unscarred.

It has been my fate to know people who have made considerable amounts of money, sometimes millions, in the market. One is Harry, who made it and blew it and made it again. Harry really wanted to make a million dollars, and he did. I think Mr. Linheart Stearns had a very good point when he said the end object of investment ought to be serenity. Now if you think making a million dollars will give you serenity, there are two things you can do. One is to find a good head doctor and see if you can discover why you think a million dollars will give you this serenity. This will involve lying on a couch, remembering dreams, talking about your mother, and paying forty dollars an hour. If your course is successful, you will realize that you do not want a million dollars but something else which the million dollars represents to you, such as love, potency, mother, or what have you. Released, you can go off about your business and not worry any more, and you will be poorer only by the number of hours you spent in accomplishing this times forty dollars.

The other thing you can do is to go ahead and make the million dollars and be serene. Then you will have both a million dollars and serenity, and you do not have to deduct the number of hours times forty dollars unless you feel guilty about making it.

It seems simple, and there is indeed a catch. What do you do if the million dollars arrives and serenity does not? Aha, you say, you will worry about that when you get to it, you are shure you can handle it. Perhaps you can. Money, contrary to popular myth, does help people more than it spoils them, simply because it opens up more options. The danger is that when you have your million, you then want two, because you have a button saying I Am A Millionaire and that is who you are, and there are, all of a sudden – as you will notice – so many people with buttons saying I Am a Double Millionaire.

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The trouble with Harry is not just the trouble with one man who made and lost a lot of money, nor even that there are hatching, at this very instant, other Harrys who will play out this role next month and next year. The trouble goes beyond Harry, beyond Wall Street; it’s a kind of virus in the whole country, when the cards of identity say not how well the shoe is cobbled or the song is sung, but are a set of numbers from an adding machine. Usually we hear only the triumphs by adding machine, but those who live by numbers can also perish by them, and it is a terrible thing to have an adding machine write an epitaph, either way. Perhaps measuring men by the marketplace is one of the penalties of our age, but if some scholar would tell us why this must be, we would all know more about ourselves.

Boilt down, the gist of this passage is two lessons:

1) Don’t get emotionally involved in your stock, fund, or whatever investment you make. All decisions should be made without regard to your past ownership or any other factors besides the fundamental and technical analysis you do on your investment choices.

2) Have a goal in mind for your investment activity. What “Smith” recommends is simply serenity – and if you can define “serenity” for yourself, you’ve set the goal. And if serenity isn’t what you’re looking for, choose and define “chaos” or whatever is important to you.

Photo by Wikimedia

Excerpt from The Money Game, by ‘Adam Smith’, pages 81-84