Opinion
Housel: Elon Musk's Greatest Product Is Tesla Stock, Not Its Cars
“The greatest product that Elon Musk has ever made is not a Tesla car. It's not a SpaceX rocket. It's Tesla stock. It's the ticker TSLA. Because what he has done is he has told a more effective story about what Tesla might become in the future than maybe any ot…”
Insight
Housel: Excessive VC Capital Broke Good Businesses by Forcing Unnatural Growth
“There were so many businesses in the last decade that were good businesses with a good product that customers loved. And let's say their natural growth rate was 50% per year. Just throwing that out there. But a lot of VCs are like, oh, we're going to give you …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Housel: 50 Years of Indexing Beats 98% of Investors Net of Fees
“And I also know that if I can be an index fund investor for 50 years, I will probably end up in the top two percent of all investors who are doing this, particularly after fees, after taxes, transaction costs, top two percent.”
Insight
Housel: Financial Pundits Escape Penalty for Being Wrong by Soothing Clients
“If you are a pundit in the financial industry or an analyst or an economist, whatever word you want to use, If you tell people what they want to hear, you can be wrong for a long time without any penalty, because what you are doing, you're giving your clients …”
Opinion
Morgan Housel attributes 99 percent of Warren Buffett's success to time horizon
“We know with just the simple arithmetic, he's done what he's been able to do because he's been investing for 75 years. That's it. That's 99% of the explanation. So the only book describing Buffett's success, if you want to emulate that success, is the title of…”
Opinion
Housel: A Majority of Personality May Be Inherent at Conception
“Part of that too, actually a huge part of it, is my growing belief that a lot of our personalities, maybe the majority of our personalities, are forged at conception, and there's nothing we can do about it. It's just on the nature-nurture spectrum, there's a l…”
Opinion
Housel: Education Cannot Overcome a Lack of Innate Aptitude
“If you're a musician, you either understood it instantly when you're six years old or never. You're never going to be a musician. We want to think that because we're intelligent and educated, we can just go learn a new topic. And to some extent, it's true. To …”
Insight
Housel: Happiness Is a Five-Minute Emotion, Not a Lasting State
“Happiness is always a five minute emotion. Happiness never hits you for more than a couple minutes at a time.”
Insight
Housel: Net worth above $100M does not meaningfully change lifestyle
“Anything over, I would say in the tens of millions of dollars, it's not going to change your lifestyle that much. It's really not going to change that much. Maybe let's say a hundred million, anything over a hundred. By and large, you're living in the same hou…”
Insight
Housel: Spoiled kids result from judging people by wealth, not material privilege
“Whenever you have spoiled children, it's usually not because the children had a big material life. It's because the parents, maybe without even knowing it, taught their kids that you should judge other people by how much money they have, not how much wisdom th…”
Insight
Housel: Spending on experiences is often a trap for social status
“One that seems very harmless and innocent is the spend money on experiences. I think it's bad for two reasons. One, a lot of times the experience that you want is what will make a good Instagram picture. That's especially true for young people. And you're not …”
Assertion Supported
Housel: The Psychology of Money Missed NYT List Over UK Publisher
“It did not make the New York Times bestseller list because since the publisher is a UK publisher, it was blacklisted from it.”
Insight
Housel: Sustaining average returns over long periods beats maximizing single-year returns
“What actually matters in investing is not what the highest returns that you can earn are in any given year. It's what returns that you can sustain for the longest period of time. And I think the dirtiest secret in investing is that average returns sustained fo…”
Insight
Housel: Private Markets' Advantage Is Illiquidity Forcing Good Investor Behavior
“And I think if there is a structural advantage to private markets advantage over public, it tends to be that the lack of liquidity is forcing a good level of behavior that I think is a wonderful thing.”
Insight
Housel: Fund managers lose LPs by pitching unrealistic risk bands
“And I think a lot of fund managers, when they get into problems with their investor base, with their LPs, it's because they have given their LPs, their investors, a false definition, a false sense of what the risks are going to take. You might have a fund mana…”
Insight
Housel: A 50% Market Drop Is Not a Risk If It's Expected
“Look, I have experienced, and will experience again in the future, the market falling 50%. Do I view that in, for me personally, as a risk? I don't know if I would put that in the category of risk, because I expect it to happen. If I expect it to happen, it's …”
What-if
Housel: Wall Street Critics Would Have Packaged Subprime for $4M Bonuses
“What people missed is that if they had the same incentives as the banker from Lehman Brothers, and their boss said, hey, if you package these subprime bonds, we'll give you a four million dollar bonus. You would have done the same thing too. Of course you woul…”
Insight
Housel: Outlier Founders Like Musk and Bezos Are Tortured, Not Ambitious
“Patrick said the phrase that he would use to describe their personality is not driven by It's not ambitious. It's tortured. They wake up every morning tortured that they are not more successful, bigger, richer than they are. And I think that's true for virtual…”
Insight
Housel: Finance Has No Single Right Answer, Resembles Personal Taste in Music
“So the idea that investing and money Is more akin to like your taste in music where nobody's right or wrong. Everyone's just has a different view of what's good and what's bad. It's hard to grasp that in a field like finance where it's taught as a math-based f…”
Insight
Housel: Authors do their best work writing for themselves, not audiences
“If you're writing for an audience of one, yourself, then you're naturally going to do your best work. Writing for yourself is really fun, and I think it shows in the writing. Writing for other people is work, and that shows in the writing.”
Insight
Morgan Housel argues financial crises are explained by psychology, not economics
“The decisions that people had made and were continued to make just, you could not explain through the normal field of finance. It wasn't in those books, but you could find it. You could find the explanations for what was going on in a psychology textbook and i…”
Insight
Morgan Housel estimates 90 percent of online article virality is unpredictable luck
“I think 90% of virality, if your article does really well and it's gone, you know, doing well on social media, 90% of virality is luck. The other 10%, like it needs to be good, but you can write something that is very good that doesn't take off because viralit…”
Insight
Morgan Housel says uneducated individuals can uniquely outperform trained experts in finance
“In finance, you can be someone who has no education, no background, no experience, And vastly outperform someone who has the best education, the best background, the best experience, which doesn't happen in any other field.”
Insight
Morgan Housel argues emotional control dictates financial success far more than IQ
“I think the more important explanation though, is that that happens because what matters in finance is not what you know. It's not your IQ or your intelligence. It's just how you behave. That's the most important. It's not the only thing that's important, but …”
