In 1977, New York City experienced a wave of lovers’ lane murders perpetrated by a serial killer labeled “the Son of Sam.” In 2014, I read the obituary of Timothy Dowd, the detective who caught him. I loved the part where it quoted him as saying it was his job “to prepare to be lucky.” Given my view of the future as indeterminate and subject to considerable randomness, I think that’s a great way to think about it. While it may sound like I’m advocating being passive and leaving things to chance, the truth is that superior investors have favorably skewed distributions of outcomes, but not
...more
