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years reading
markets
markets
Forty years spent untangling skill from luck, price from value, and signal from noise — for anyone patient enough to read the footnotes.
Everything we do mixes skill and luck — and the mix is knowable. The test is brutally simple: ask whether you can lose on purpose. If you can't, you're holding a lottery ticket, however hard you're concentrating.
Hover the markers. Note where investing sits — not because investors lack skill, but because they have so much of it. That paradox gets its own room, next door.
The two-jar model. Every outcome is one draw from each jar: what you control, and what you don't.
last draws — ▮ skill ▮ outcome. Watch them disagree. That gap is why we judge process, not outcome.
Everyone got smarter. Everyone got the same data, the same CFA, the same Bloomberg. So the spread of excess returns collapsed — and when everyone is skilled, results are decided by what's left over: luck. More skill, more luck. Drag the years.
The ghost curve is 1967. As the distribution narrows, beating the market stops being a test of who is good and becomes a test of who is good and lucky. This is why he tells the marathon story, and why the .400 hitter is extinct.
No one reads forty years of work in one sitting — but you can see it. Every major book, landmark paper, governing idea and guiding influence, drawn as the complex adaptive system it actually is. Hover a star. Drag one. Watch the web object.
Constellation is curated, not complete — the full bibliography would need a bigger sky.
Six desks, two constants. The firms changed; the project never did. Gold spines are books. Small ticks are landmark papers. The long threads are Columbia and Santa Fe — the classroom and the institute.
Forty years of telling us, patiently and with footnotes, that we are never quite as good — or as bad — as our results suggest.