Hacker News Reader

How many Graham-trained "superinvestors" never beat the markets, though?

What "superinvestors" are you alluding to here? Are you suggesting that getting investment advice from Graham is sufficient to reproduce the kinds of returns he and Buffett have had? Because that seems like an unrealistic expectation, and a totally orthogonal argument to whether or not investors can "beat the market". It's like talking about Google and then asking how many other Stanford CS grads never went on to start successful tech companies.

Learning from somebody good doesn't automatically guarantee you'll end up being as good as them afterwards, for a variety of factors.

The point was about selection bias: just because you can observe n successful Graham investors in the wild does not tell you how many Graham investors there were to begin with. Nor does it tell you whether the proportion of successful Graham investors is greater than the proportion of successful investors from other schools.

> Learning from somebody good doesn't automatically guarantee you'll end up being as good as them afterwards, for a variety of factors.

Exactly the point. How many students did Graham have over the years who flunked out, or went on to underperform the market?

How many articles got written about those guys?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com