This Time It's Also Not Different
The Dividend Cafe
The Dividend Cafe - The Bahnsen Group
4.9 • 572 Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today's Post - https://bahnsen.co/3u3NcAi
Sir John Templeton could have never known what staying power his famous edict would have when he wrote in 1933, “The investor who says, ‘This time is different,’ when in fact it’s virtually a repeat of an earlier situation, has uttered among the four most costly words in the annals of investing.” He wasn’t wrong, and the vast majority of the time that famous quote is used (mostly via paraphrase), it captures a vital truism – that people assuming certain things about the past are no longer true and investing accordingly generally get their faces ripped off.
Today, we unpack what issues are the same, what may be different, and what that all means for an investor in 2023. Lots of things stay the same in this world because the creator of the world is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The law of gravity is still working. Men and women are still different. And UCLA is still a mediocre football program (hey, now!). But some things do change because that same creator made the world to be dynamic and gave the human race agency in its stewardship. And we know human beings can be temperamental.
So jump on into the Dividend Cafe, and let’s discuss the permanence in change of being an investor (extra credit to any who remember the second greatest band of my youth, The Alarm).
Links mentioned in this episode: TheDCToday.com DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Dividing Cafe weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio |
| 0:06.5 | and dividends in your understanding of economic life. |
| 0:12.4 | Well, hello and welcome to this week's Dividend Cafe. |
| 0:16.2 | I'm David Bonson. |
| 0:17.5 | I'm sitting at my desk in New York because our studios had a mechanical failure. |
| 0:22.6 | I think we had one of these with D.C. |
| 0:24.1 | today one other time, but it's kind of a rare deal, and yet we sort of have to get to the |
| 0:28.5 | recording, and I don't really think most of you care where I'm sitting while I do it. |
| 0:33.2 | So we are recording in a slightly different backdrop and yet nonetheless recording all the same with, |
| 0:41.2 | I think, a really interesting message for you this week. |
| 0:45.7 | One of the issues, one of the phrases, the sayings that is so commonly used in my business and for the investing community |
| 0:57.7 | is this time it's different and saying it as a sort of pejorative, like mockery. |
| 1:07.0 | It comes from Sir John Templeton in 1933 in a letter he wrote to investors saying that this time it's different could be the foremost expensive words in investing. |
| 1:21.6 | And it refers to a concept that I talk about all the time. |
| 1:25.7 | The most common way that people in financial services, |
| 1:29.7 | in the field of wealth management, use it, |
| 1:33.6 | is to reiterate to people that are tempted to panic |
| 1:37.9 | when the stock market's down, |
| 1:40.8 | that the stock market will come back. |
| 1:43.8 | And whether it's in one month or three months or three years, |
| 1:47.5 | that long term this time is not different. |
| 1:51.5 | Markets tend to recover. |
... |
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