Image credit: Raphael, “St. George and the Dragon,” ca. 1506, National Gallery of Art
By Jason Zweig
Nov. 20, 2014
My recent column, “The Lessons of Forex Trading: Learn from Your Losses,” reminded me of something, and I couldn’t remember what. Finally it came to me: I’d written something at least a little similar almost 15 years ago, in early 2000, right at the peak of the Internet bubble.
That earlier column looked at research led by psychologists Max Bazerman of Harvard University and Don Moore, now at the University of California at Berkeley. They found that nearly 90% of investors exaggerated their returns and that many who thought they had beaten the market had been beaten by it. A set of questions that I posed around the same time in a survey of magazine readers found similar results — in fact, a fairly large number of people were convinced that they had beaten the market although they didn’t even know what their own returns were.
Here’s the column. If you read it, let me know whether you think it still makes sense. I think it probably does.
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Source: Jason Zweig, “Did You Beat the Market?,” Money Magazine, January 2000
http://www.jasonzweig.com/from-the-archives-did-you-beat-the-market/
