Temperaments and Teams 99Employment Interest and Money, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
1936].Let’s apply Keynes’s metaphor to the current markets. Today
we have more people playing the markets and greater diversity of
personalities than ever before. (Traditionally, it was mostly lions
playing the market and running the big firms. Now, there are nearly
100 million participants in the market. There are only about 50
million lions in the United States, so that means half the market
now is nonlion.) Imagine Keynes’s beauty contest with all white
females and white males as beauties and judges, respectively. This
was like the market of the mid-20th century in America: mostly
lion investors buying lion-run companies. Now, enter some diver-
sity. Imagine that the females pictured are equally divided between
Caucasian, African, Asian, and Indian. Likewise, the judges are
equally divided. If a Caucasian male did not alter his approach to
the market based on the new diversity, then he might well pick
mostly Caucasian females, because he is used to that. He will lose
because the winning pictures will probably reflect the new diver-
sity of the group.
How does this metaphor relate to the current stock market? As
noted earlier, investors with different styles are entering the mar-
kets and voting with their dollars. As in the beauty contest, this
increasing diversity will cause different stocks to be winners.
Hence, it’s important to understand the personalities of the new
market players. We’ve discussed the lions earlier, but what of the
other 50 million new players? What are their characteristics and
how will their votes (i.e., dollars) affect the market?
Some useful generalizations can be drawn from the earlier
discussion about personality styles. Whereas the MBTI identifies
16 unique personality styles, based on combinations of the eight
types, a man named Keirsey developed a simpler scheme for divid-
ing people into just four temperaments. (See David Keirsey’s Por-
traits of Temperament (Prometheus Nemesis 1987).) Your tempera-08-13 ware 99 1/19/01, 1:11 PM