Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

It’s a quote from Keynes.

Keynes thought that professional money managers were playing an intricate guessing game. He likened it to a common newspaper game,

“. . . in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from 100 photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole: so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces that he himself finds prettiest, but those that he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view . . . We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what the average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth, and higher degrees.”

It does not matter if you or your investment managers make the decision on what to buy and what to sell, everyone is guessing.

It means you need a process. Here’s how you develop a process.