Nick Arnett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> For public companies, the "long run" is anything more than a year or two,
What is it for politicians?
> Who cares if the company will run out of trees, as long as it isn't going to
> happen until long after the current senior management and board are gone?
I'd peg the long-run for investors at about 20 to 30 years, which is about the
longevity of many investing careers. I agree that few companies excel at
planning ahead by more than a couple years. But that is because predicting
the future more than a few years ahead is difficult. That is why the
free-markets
have historically outperformed planned economies. Humans are bad at planning
ahead, but if you have a sufficiently large and diverse "gene-pool" of plans,
random events and natural selection will tend to evolve a few successful plans.
> Look at what has happened in a traditionally
> low-risk marketplace -- real estate -- lately. Even there, investors
> started having crazy expectations. And yes, the market is correcting, but
> look at the fallout.
People thought that real-estate always went up, at least for the past 30
years in the US, they said. Now a generation of investors has learned otherwise.
That lesson will probably stay with the current generation of investors, but in
20 or 30 years the lesson may need to be "re-learned". And the investors who
learned from history will profit from the ones who did not.
> As long
> as a few people are becoming millionaires and billionaires and the rest of
> us think we have a shot at the same, nobody sees any need to change their
> perspective.
Amen!
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