Edward Quince's Wisdom Bites: The Vacuum of Noise

 Nature abhors a vacuum.

Aristotle famously declared that nature abhors a vacuum. In the financial world, we can confidently declare that Wall Street abhors silence. Whenever there is a void of actual news or a gap in genuine understanding, it is instantly filled with a deafening roar of punditry, forecasts, and manufactured panic.

The Wisdom Bite:

"If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all of our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth." - Thomas Merton 

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal

The financial industry is a machine predicated on a demand by investors to be told what the market is going to do. When the market is flat, or when the Federal Reserve goes into a blackout period, the commentators suffer from "say-something syndrome". They concoct narratives, invent "blue chip forecasts" that are no better than a coin flip, and bombard us with data. But as Nassim Taleb warns, "the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on".

The Financial Takeaway: Do not let the market's abhorrence of a vacuum force you into the "Action Bias". We are conditioned to feel that if we aren't trading, we aren't investing. But the greatest investors know that the big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting. Turn off the terminal, step away from the hubbub, and dare to just sit there.