Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger: Efficient Market Theory

good morning my name is Joe Lacey I'm from Austin Texas in this era when the financial departments of the institutions of higher learning are referring to you as an anomaly and they preach the efficient markets hypothesis saving that you can't outperform the market where does one go to find a mentor like you found in Bend round someone you can ask questions to regarding value investing my understanding is that the University of Florida has instituted a couple of courses that actually Mason Hawkins gave them a significant amount of money to finance and I believe they're they're teaching something other than efficient markets there there's there's a very good course at Columbia I know that it gets a lot of visiting teachers to come in I go in there and teach occasionally and and and but a number of practitioners do so there I think the efficient market theory is less wholly written now than it was 15 or 20 years ago and in in universities but it's it it's there's a lot of a talk but I think you can find more diversity in what is being offered now than 10 or 20 years ago and I'd recommend you know looking into those two schools it's you know it's really quite useful if you had a merchant shipping business if all of your competitors believe the world is flat you know that it is a huge edge because they will not take any they will not take on any any any cargo to go to places that are beyond where they think they will fall off and so we should be encouraging the teaching of efficient market theories in universities and day it amazed it amazes me but what if you know it I think one time that was at Cannes that said that most economists are most economical about ideas that they make the ones they learn in graduate school lasts a lifetime and what happens is that you spend years getting your PhD in finance and you you learn theories with a lot of mathematics in and that the average layman can't can't do and you become sort of a high priest and you get an enormous amount of yourself an ego and even professional security invested in those ideas and it gets very hard to back off after a after a given point and I think that to some extent has contaminated the teaching of investing in the universities Charlie I would argue that the contamination was massive but it's waning yeah this waning explaining it the good ideas eventually triumph you know a nama the word anomaly I've always found interesting on that because that you know after a while I mean Columbus wasn't enough but what it means is something that the active emissions could not explain and and rather than re-examine their theories they simply just discarded any evidence of that sort is anomalous and I think when you find information that contradicts previously cherished beliefs that you've got a special obligation to look at it and look at it quickly which I think Charlie told me that one of the things Darwin did was that whenever he found anything to contradict that some previous belief he knew that he had to write it down almost immediately because he felt that the human mind was conditioned so conditioned to reject contradictory evidence that unless he got it down in black and white very quickly his mind would would would simply push it out of existence Charlie didn't it was more about Darwin than I do maybe he can explain that well I don't know about Darwin but I did find it abusing one of these extreme efficient-market theorists explained one for many many years as an anomaly of luck and he got the six Sigma's six standard deviations of luck and then people started laughing at him because six six six Sigma's of luck is a lot so he changed his theory now Warren has six or seven Sigma's of skill so you see I'd rather have the six senses of luck actually the one thing he couldn't bear to leave was his six Sigma's

Channel: The Financial Review

Views: 29,268

Rating: 4.968689 out of 5

Keywords: efficient-market, efficient-markets, efficient market, efficient market Warren Buffet, Warren Buffet, warren buffet charlie munger, Charlie Munger efficient market, Berkshire 1998, Berkshire Hathaway, The Financial Review, investing, business advice, efficient market theory, charlie munger

Id: UZNqLWe5o2Q

Length: 4min 37sec (277 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 07 2018