Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. So equally smart people can disagree about how and why recessions happen, how you should invest your money, what you should prioritize, how much risk you should take, and so on.

Later I found out that Markowitz himself knew the same thing: Ironically, when he invested the money from his Nobel Prize, he used a portfolio with equal weights to pick a few of his favorite stocks rather than the formula he received the prize for discovering.

Even if their forecasts were true (they aren’t), no individual can get the same returns as the market unless he has infinite pockets and no uncle points. This is conflating ensemble probability and time probability. If the investor has to eventually reduce his exposure because of losses, or because of retirement, or because he got divorced to marry