Philip Cunningham III

“[W]hen a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“My investment philosophy changed when I read Charles Ellis’ book Winning the Loser’s Game. The book was given to me by my employer at the time, Michael Goodman, founder of Wealthstream Advisors, Inc. Ellis convinced me that trying to beat the market is a losing proposition. In golf, par is a good score, and avoiding bogeys is more important than making birdies. Very few professional investors beat the market consistently, after accounting for the costs. The most important takeaway from Ellis’ books is that the market return is a good return. The proliferation of low-cost index funds means that the market return is ours for the taking, if only we accept it. I have not purchased an individual stock since reading that book.”
― Joshua Brown, How I Invest My Money: Finance Experts Reveal How They Save, Spend, and Invest

“Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that teach competitor has to pick not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one's judgement are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.”
― John Maynard Keynes

“Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion