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CHAPTER
26
Quantum Investing
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
—Albert EinsteinMy first musings on creativity, spirituality, and investing began years
ago when, following Edison’s advice to look for ideas in other
disciplines, I discovered the similarities between investing and
physics. At Thanksgiving, I visit my cousins, two of whom are
physicists. (The third cousin—the dumb one—programs mainframe
computers.) When I was an active money manager, they used to
ask me about my portfolio’s performance in the same sympathetic
voice Tom Cruise might have used to ask “Rain Man” about his
pet mouse. One year, though, was worse than usual because my
older physicist cousin had recently been quoted in Business Week.
This meant, coincidentally, that at about the time he was being
interviewed by a leading magazine in my field of endeavor, I was
opening a deadbeat letter from that magazine’s collection depart-
ment.
This same older cousin wrote his doctoral thesis on some
mysterious missing elementary particle that exists theoretically but
has never actually been observed (sort of like excess returns in paper
portfolios). When I first learned of his topic, several Thanksgivings
ago, I remember offering to help look for the missing particle. I
was only kidding, of course. But the offer was met by the icy stare26-29 ware 225 1/19/01, 1:19 PM