I've been investor for 20 years. People here have been investing for a lot longer than that, but at every single point in the last 20 years, you could have made a very reasonable, plausible argument that we were on the cusp of a bubble that things were unsustainable that national debt was running out of control that inflation was right

around the corner you could have made a very reasonable argument at every single

one of those points and over those 20 years the S&P 500 is up fivefold.

I'm Mary Long and that's Morgan Housall, the best-selling author of the Psychology of Money and Same As Ever.

Robert Brokamp recently caught up with Housall in person at our member event, Foolfest.

Today's show is a cut of that conversation.

Bro and Howl discuss why novice investors can often beat

Harvard MBAs, what it means to be a reasonable optimist,

why visionary CEOs often have a dark side, and why there's always a case that the market is in a bubble.

So one of the things you wrote about your book in your book it's kind of the foundation of the book is that about a decade ago you decided

You're gonna read more about history read less about forecasts and you said it was one of most

Enlightening choices that you made. Tell us about that. Well a lot of it just came from when my time as a Motley Full writer just spending that much time

with the financial media, whether it was

the NBC or various blogs and whatnot,

how bad the forecasting track record is.

And it is abysmal.

And I'm not talking stock picking.

I'm talking to people saying, oh, the next recession is going to start in June or

the stock market's going to go down 7% this year. That kind of forecasting the track

record over time for the last century is as bad as you can possibly imagine.

It's terrible, but we keep doing it over and over and over again.

So I very quickly said, I don't want anything to do with that.

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