About this episode
In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. In this series, they discuss Chapter 33: An Investor’s Worst Enemy.LEARNING: You are your own worst enemy when it comes to investing. “The right strategy is to avoid the loser’s game. Don’t try to pick individual stocks or time the market, just invest in a disciplined way, and you will win by getting the market’s return.”Larry Swedroe In this episode of Enrich Your Future, Andrew and Larry Swedroe discuss Larry’s new book, Enrich Your Future: The Keys to Successful Investing. The book is a collection of stories that Larry has developed over 30 years as the head of financial and economic research at Buckingham Wealth Partners to help investors. You can learn more about Larry’s Worst Investment Ever story on Ep645: Beware of Idiosyncratic Risks.Larry deeply understands the world of academic research and investing, especially risk. Today, Andrew and Larry discuss Chapter 33: An Investor’s Worst Enemy.Chapter 33: An Investor’s Worst EnemyIn this chapter, Larry demonstrates why investors are their own worst enemies. He observes that many people think the key to investing is identifying the stocks that will outperform the market and avoiding the ones that will underperform.Yet the vast body of evidence says that’s playing the losers’ game. He adds that most professionals with advanced degrees in finance and mathematics, with access to the best databases and huge advantages over individuals, often think they’re smart enough to beat the market.They do so by attempting to uncover individual securities they believe the rest of the market has somehow mispriced (the price is too high or too low). They also try to time their investment decisions to buy when the market is “undervalued” and sell when it is “overvalued.”However, evidence shows that 98% of them fail to outperform in any statistically significant way on a risk-adjusted basis, even before taxes. As historian and author Peter Bernstein puts it: “The essence of investment theory is that being smart is not a sufficient condition for being rich.”Why do people keep playing the loser’s game?In the face of such overwhelming evidence, the puzzli
