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Comment by Eliezer | Hacker News Reader

No, I think "top money manager at a major Wall Street firm" and otherwise unattributed actually is random people.

Even attributed it's still basically random people. The underperformance of mutual and hedge funds pretty much shows that the professionals are no better at predicting the future of the market than a monkey with a dart board.

Bernard Lietaer (former central banker, successful currency speculator, one of the architects of what today is the Euro, and nowadays complementary currency advocate) starts most of his post-crisis conferences by asking the public to raise their hands if they believe that the worst of the crisis is past/ahead of us. Generally, most people will raise their hand to state their belief that the worst is still to come. Here's an example, in front of an audience of financial journalists:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfMbYllbN6c

(Skip to 2:40 for the actual start if you want.)

Direct link to 2:40 of the referenced video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfMbYllbN6c#t=2m40s

That doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't buy stocks.

It is extremely unlikely that you will time the bottom of the market just right. So even if it will continue to get worse for a while, it might still be a good decision to continue buying into the market so that when the bottom does hit, you will have bought some stocks right around that time.

This all depends on your investment horizon, etc. etc.

There is still the possibility that a significant part of your particular investment vehicles will just vanish forever.

Do you mean to imply that the post's author was lying, the person he was talking to was lying, or that a top money manager at a major Wall Street firm's opinion is just as good as that of a random person?

If the last one, I'm inclined to think that someone who thinks about something full-time is statistically more likely to guess correctly about it than someone who doesn't.

Most of my friends on Wall Street say you shouldn't trust random top money managers at major Wall Street firms - that's not over the interesting competence threshold. I am, obviously, paraphrasing, but it's the impression I get.

Why trust your friends on Wall Street then? ;-)

Basically, his friends on Wall Street are telling him to not trust his friends on Wall Street when it comes to financial advice.

I'm struggling to determine whether this fits the Liar's Paradox, or not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_witness more so than Liar's Paradox.

"I'm inclined to think that someone who thinks about something full-time is statistically more likely to guess correctly about it than someone who doesn't."

If the system they're thinking about is a system defined by other people also thinking about it, and they're all trying to outsmart each other, and the system itself is too large and complex for any one mind to grasp, maybe not. And in fact, I've heard (no citation) that you'll as well on average throwing darts at stocks as hiring a stockbroker, and you'll save the fees. Which is why I'm inclined to invest in an index fund and forget about it.

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