Once you’ve truly absorbed this fundamental truth, the Baltimore stockbroker has no power over you. That the stockbroker handed you ten straight good stock picks is very unlikely; that he handed somebody such a good run of picks, given ten thousand chances, is not even remotely surprising. In the British statistician R. A. Fisher’s famous formulation, “the ‘one chance in a million’ will undoubtedly occur, with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us.”
