(Expanded from February 7, 2025)
Welcome back to the digital saloon, where we trade fleeting forecasts for the only currency that matters: reality.
In February, we stumbled into one of my favorite investing parables—one involving cosmology, Bell Labs, and a rather unglamorous pile of pigeon droppings.
The Noise That Wasn’t
In the mid-1960s, astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were attempting to eliminate a persistent hiss in their radio antenna. They tried everything—checking wiring, changing orientation, even scraping away what they delicately described as “white dielectric material.” (Translation: bird poop.)
They assumed the noise was an error. A nuisance. Something to be cleaned.
It wasn’t.
The hiss turned out to be the cosmic microwave background radiation—the afterglow of the Big Bang itself. In trying to remove “noise,” they discovered the origin story of the universe.
There is a lesson here for investors, and it’s not subtle.
The Illusion of Control
Markets are not moved by neat models; they are shaped by outliers, accidents, and events that never made it into your spreadsheet.
The human brain despises uncertainty. Robert Greene calls the “need for certainty” the greatest disease of the mind. It pushes us to mistake confidence for competence and precision for truth.
This is why strategists still publish year-end S&P targets with decimal points, as if the market were a Swiss watch instead of a drunk octopus.
If you relied solely on forecasts to understand markets, you’d have been confused for roughly a century.
Embracing the “I Don’t Know”
The most honest answer to “what will the market do next?” remains: I don’t know.
Rather than predicting rain, build the ark.
Intellectual humility is not weakness—it is structural strength. What you dismiss as noise today may be the signal that defines tomorrow. As Eisenhower reminded us: plans are useless, but planning is indispensable—because the crisis is always the thing you didn’t plan for.
Sometimes the universe speaks softly. Sometimes it sounds like static. Sometimes it looks like bird poop.
Ignore it at your peril.
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