All specialists have a time frame that they believe is important—the astrophysicist who thinks in terms of billions of years can’t put himself in the mind of the meteorologist who thinks about the future in terms of hours and days. Both will be befuddled by the archaeologist whose time scale spans less that that of the astrophysicist but more than

But the market has even crueler twists. It’s not sufficient that a player figure out when the game has changed. When a market shifts, it usually requires the investor to adopt a psychological stance anathema to the precepts upon which he built his earlier success.

Although the Oppenheimer Fund was never number one in any given year, over its first ten years, it had the best performance record of any mutual fund in the country, according to The New York Times.

Investors are very good at recognizing the moods of the past—for example, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Swinging Sixties—but we tend to be oblivious to the mood of the present. When do we notice that the world has changed? Sometimes change arrives with a bang. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima instantly and permanently

both cases, psychology proved critical. Napoleon’s delusion was to believe in military strategy and underestimate the role of morale; his generals failed to appreciate that Russian citizens battling for their lives on their home soil had far greater incentive to fight than did a poilu from Paris yearning for the Champs Elysées. The LTCM strategists

mistake in launching the Oppenheimer Fund was in not sufficiently appreciating how skepticism about the unfamiliar can obscure the merits of even the best ideas.

(It is interesting to note that any profitable market strategy, no matter how obviously it is driven by greed, always is deemed good for society by those who reap the profits.)

My passion for ancient history and archaeology also gives me perspective.

INVESTORS, we deceive ourselves a thousand different ways, both small and large. We attribute gains to acumen when they are the product of luck, and attribute losses to ill fortune when they are often the product of stupidity or inattention. We believe that the market remembers or cares about the price we paid for a stock, or that our stocks will g