Mark Sellers at Harvard

Fascinating talk. It’s a big long but well worth it. Here’s a sample:

I know that everyone in this room is exceedingly intelligent and you’ve all worked hard to get where you are. You are the brightest of the bright. And yet, there’s one thing you should remember if you remember nothing else from my talk: You have almost no chance of being a great investor. You have a really, really low probability, like 2% or less. And I’m adjusting for the fact that you all have high IQs and are hard workers and will have an MBA from one of the top business schools in the country soon. If this audience was just a random sample of the population at large, the likelihood of anyone here becoming a great investor later on would be even less, like 1/50th of 1% or something. You all have a lot of advantages over Joe Investor, and yet you have almost no chance of standing out from the crowd over a long period of time.
And the reason is that it doesn’t much matter what your IQ is, or how many books or magazines or newspapers you have read, or how much experience you have, or will have later in your career. These are things that many people have and yet almost none of them end up compounding at 20% or 25% over their careers.

Posted by on November 5th, 2007 at 5:11 pm


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