I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.
Interpretation
The stock market is often influenced by irrational behavior, leading to unpredictable outcomes.
Paul Samuelson suggests that in the realm of the stock market, many investors act irrationally, which can manifest in various forms. This irrationality not only complicates analysis but also contributes to the unpredictable nature of market results, highlighting the challenges of forecasting in finance.
In practice
During an investment seminar, I quoted Samuelson to illustrate the unpredictability of market trends.
To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.
I can't think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics.
My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.
Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.
Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
If you're trading individual securities, you're almost certainly making a mistake. Because most professional managers can't outperform their benchmarks, and there's little reason to think that individuals can.
Gold is money and nothing else.
In other words, the percentage change in book value in any given year is likely to be reasonably close to that year's change in intrinsic value.
Investors should invest on what they know. The biggest mistake is to invest on what they don't know.
When somebody asserts that a stock has an earning power of so much, I am sure that the person who hears him doesn't know what he means, and there is a good chance that the man who uses it doesn't know what it means.
Investing isn’t risky; not being in control is risky.
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