We live in a world of proliferating choice. A search for “men’s socks” on Amazon.com yielded over 80,000 results. 80,000+! Did anyone reading this ever anticipate having to choose between tens of thousands of options for socks, let alone anything else? I certainly did not.
This sparked my curiosity about a variety of other everyday items one might need:
Ted Williams has a special place in my heart. As one of the all-time Red Sox greats and a favorite of my Dad, he is best known as the last major leaguer to finish the regular season with a batting average (BA) of .400 or better. He accomplished this feat in 1941 with an average of .406 marking the 28th occurrence of this rare accomplishment (including competing pro leagues in the late 1800s).
Over time, the .400 batting average has gone the way of the dinosaur. It’s been over 75 years since it was last accomplished. In the 1890’s it was achieved 11 times, including 5 players who had a BA over .400 in the 1894 season. Through the first 65 years of pro baseball, its occurrence has risen and fallen, eventually being snuffed out since Ted Williams made it happen.
Reposting guest content from Fintech startup Essentia Analytics.
Reading Time: 4 minutes
As an allocator with many years of experience, I’ve seen hundreds of equity strategies – in every flavor and size.
Truth be told, once you’ve accounted for the different style and market cap biases (which can anyway be accessed via much cheaper passive vehicles), you’re left with a fairly homogenous group of experts in terms of idea generation and analysis.
This makes it a huge challenge to find an active strategy that one believes has high odds of outperformance.
The objective of stroke play in golf is to make your way through 18 holes in the fewest strokes possible. This requires avoiding mistakes as each mis-hit adds one or more strokes to your score.
Too many amateurs ignore this and choose the risky, hero shot. This shot is typically an attempt to salvage a chance to make birdie or par. Like when you try to hit a 30-yard fade with a 7 iron through an 18 inch opening in the woods. You choose the low probability, high reward shot instead of the high probability, damage mitigation shot that keeps your round on track.
This is a mistake.
