It Ain't What You Don't Know
The Dividend Cafe
The Dividend Cafe - The Bahnsen Group
4.9 • 572 Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The title of this week's Dividend Cafe comes from one of my favorite quotes, ever.
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." ~ Mark Twain
(I attribute to Mark Twain because everyone does, but ironically given the substance of the quote, even this appears to be untrue, with most scholars believing there is no reputable source for who quoted these exact words).
The underlying message here is never more relevant than in investing, it seems to me. Plenty of people don't know certain things, and that has some impact at given times. But I am quite convinced that far more damage is done, not at the things that are that people don't know, but the things that people believe to be true (and act upon), when in fact they are not.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Dividend Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio |
| 0:06.5 | and dividends in your understanding of economic life. |
| 0:12.2 | Hello and welcome to another week of the Dividend Cafe video and podcast. |
| 0:18.6 | I'm actually in a hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee, and recording before |
| 0:24.0 | the market opens Friday morning. It's been a pretty boring week in the markets and a little |
| 0:29.6 | up, a little down, different things. And you know, you're getting those daily updates of what's |
| 0:34.2 | happening in the market in D.C. today. So I won't waste our time in Dividing |
| 0:38.8 | Cafe with the day-by-day weekly market stuff because today I'm going to go into a couple |
| 0:44.7 | bigger picture issues. And I want to start with a quote that is attributed to Mark Twain, |
| 0:53.2 | because this is basically the subject of today's Divida Cafe, |
| 0:56.7 | but I also want to point out that I don't think Mark Twain actually said this, |
| 1:02.0 | and we don't really know, and there's a whole story on that, but either way, I don't care. |
| 1:07.1 | Okay, it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. |
| 1:14.2 | And that is a pretty widely distributed quote. |
| 1:19.0 | I myself have said it or some version of it many times. |
| 1:22.6 | I'm sure most of you have heard some kind of sentiment, you know, that captured that same idea. |
| 1:31.5 | And I think that in the world of investing, there are all kinds of different opinions. |
| 1:36.2 | They're all kind of things that people can disagree on. |
| 1:39.3 | And of course, there's a lot of things that people don't know. |
| 1:42.1 | Like there's information that they're not |
| 1:44.7 | privy to realities or even underlying principles that people may not fully grasp. All of all of that |
| 1:53.4 | I understand. You know, I don't think that the point of the Dividendon Cafe is to go solve |
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