Knowledge is power. That’s not a novel thought of mine. It’s a well-worn saying. But the reason knowledge is power is because of confidence. Confidence is the often overlooked link between knowledge and power.
Take investing, for instance. If you don’t understand why your investment went up, you’re likely to bail on it quickly when it goes down. And that is a surefire way to lose money over time.
Investing is a confidence game. And knowledge is the best way to gain confidence. Once you have confidence, you have power. The power to ignore what others say or do. The power to sit tight in the face of market drops. The power to focus your time and energy on things other than your investment portfolio.
I have confidence in advising people to put a sizable portion of their net worths in the stock market – and parking it there indefinitely – because I understand what makes the market work. And trust me, it ain’t because some fat cat is “pulling on the strings” to make the market go up or down. No one has that kind of money or power. Full stop.
No one.
Think about it. The value of the entire U.S. stock market is $55.3 trillion. To make the market move by 1%, you would have to put in or yank out more than $550 billion, which practically speaking would be terribly difficult for one person to do in a day in the first place.
Consider, the richest person in the world is Elon Musk. He has “only” $271 billion in wealth, and the vast majority of that wealth is parked in equity of companies he owns. It’s not cold, hard cash or in an investment that he could quickly sell on a public market. Musk, on his own, couldn’t silently cause a 1% move in the market.
Or how about this? Berkshire Hathaway, the Omaha-based company led by Warren Buffett, has one of the largest cash piles of any company. As of June 30, its cash position was $277 billion. Even if Buffett quietly deployed all that cash to buy into the market, theoretically, it would increase it by less than 1%.
What makes a market is not simply a couple of well-connected bazillionaires who play everyone else for fools. A market – whether it be the stock market or a farmers’ market – is simply a bunch of people making independent decisions about whether and what to buy and sell.
So why does the market sometimes go haywire? Because while investors can make independent decisions, they don’t always.
As it turns out, humans are herd animals. Rather than thinking for ourselves objectively, many of us rely on others for insight into what we should do. It happens all the time in investing. We see others making money in the stock market and we follow suit by buying stocks or investment funds. We hear about others getting out of the market as it falls and we do the same by dumping stocks or investment funds without a thought as to why we purchased them in the first place.
Like a herd of cattle, we blindly stampede in and out of the market because the fellow next to us got excited or spooked – regardless of whether their decision was relevant to our situation.
But if you understand why you own an investment and what makes it go up, you are less likely to bail as soon as it starts going down. I wish all investors were armed with that knowledge, with that confidence. If so, the stock market would be a much saner place, and we would see fewer dramatic downswings.
Then again, if all investors behaved rationally all the time, it would neutralize an amazing opportunity for those investors who have confidence in the future and who are willing to buy while the market is on sale.
And that kind of power can create serious wealth.