What questions really matter if you want to charge people to manage their money?
A decade ago Ken Fisher, head of Fisher Investments and a regular FT columnist, published a provocative book on the “The Only Three Questions That Count” for investors. In a nutshell, they were, what do I believe that’s wrong, what can I fathom that others cannot, and what is my brain doing to mislead me?
This was a great manifesto for conquering mental flaws and heuristics, and for finding the kind of big contrarian calls that can lead to significant outperformance. But a decade on, the battle is with the machines. Big Data, machine learning and artificial learning, all of them ambiguous terms, are taking the industry by storm. Meanwhile, passive investing has made great inroads since the Fisher book came out.