Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Guy Spier on why it may not be best to publicly discuss current ideas...

From Guy's 2013 Annual Letter:
In recent years, I’ve found that it works better not to talk publicly about current holdings in the fund. This is not a matter of guarding our secrets to prevent other investors from stealing them. The real issue is that, once a person has made a public statement, it’s psychologically difficult for them to back away from it — even if they’ve realized that their stated opinion was wrong. In his seminal book The Psychology of Influence, Robert Cialdini called this the “commitment and consistency principle.”
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Related book: Influence

Related previous post: The mistake of consistency