(1) autonomy, the extent to which we have the ability to control our own lives, “to do our own thing”

Keynes defined investment - he called it “enterprise” - as “forecasting the prospective yield of an asset over its entire life.” He defined speculation as “the activity of forecasting the market.”

Therefore, as I wrote in my Little Book of Common Sense Investing, “the stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.”

Albert Schweitzer got it exactly right. “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”

Investing is all about the long-term ownership of businesses. Speculation is precisely the opposite. It is all about the short-term trading, not long-term holding, of financial instruments—pieces of paper, not businesses—largely focused on the belief that their prices, as distinct from their intrinsic values, will rise.

It’s not money that determines our happiness, but the presence of some combination of these three attributes:

(3) exercising competence, using our God-given and self-motivated talents, inspired and striving to learn

The totally unpredictable perceptions of market participants, reflected in momentary stock prices and in the changing multiples that drive speculative returns, essentially have counted for nothing.

It is economics that controls long-term equity returns; the impact of emotions, so dominant in the short term, dissolves.