想在股市上赚钱，最重要的是做到这一点

投资者容易产生两种担心情绪，担心的内容相反但都很让人烦：第一是担心经济形势好的时候错过机会，第二则是担心市场波动时亏损。两种恐惧与理性决策之间是零和关系。也就是说，越被恐惧情绪支配，就越难理智。

作为投资者，如何实现尽可能理性呢？有一条建议：关掉电视。

我们办公室里很少看财经节目。股市全天波动完全随机，影响单个股票上下波动的因素也在推动市场波动，各种因素的目标和时间范围可能与个人的目标和时间范围没有共同点。我认为电视节目制片人应该保证连续叙述，才能解释随机性。

财经频道还会进一步影响理性，让人感觉股票市场像个游戏。财经节目只会鼓励人们加入游戏，随着考虑的时间范围从数年缩短到几分钟，可能将之前的研究结论抛诸脑后。

总看财经节目还可能让人投资时不够谦逊。财经频道评论股市的嘉宾往往会树立绝对正确的形象（与谦逊相反）。再说一次，我很同情他们，因为嘉宾上电视都在拼命推销自己和自己的业务，必须表现出智商200的睿智形象，对每个话题都要点评一番。

你永远不可能听他们说出投资的实质：“其实我也不知道。”不愿承认不确定性存在危险，因为可能导致忘记投资其实基于概率。如果你开始认为未来只有一条路，可能就会忽略其他的路，搭建投资组合时忽略其他的风险。如果你相信自己对每家公司都了如指掌，能力范围就没有界限，过度自信可能导致无路可走（投资血本无归）。

由于财经节目嘉宾永远不承认“不知道”，也会自信地回答本不该问的问题，例如“经济和股市下一步怎么走？”如果投资经验够多，很容易对股市和经济下一步走向发表意见（通常是直觉）。然而，真正优秀的基金经理都在努力避免此类直觉，因为直觉可以准一次但难保次次准。

如果踏准了股票市场或经济走向，也只不过是运气，除了运气没别的。经济和股票市场行为，特别是短期动向非常随机。上帝不会让人说准接下来会发生什么，因为这与赌博玩21点时预测下一张牌没有什么不同。

当好投资者，而不是预言家

以前我和同事们经常自称是“长期投资”同道中人。然而随着时间的推移，自我判断已经变成“买入持有（怎么也不卖）的投资者”。

另外我们认为，长期投资者的说法有点多余，因为股市上没有短期投资。只要在投资股票，期限自然应该是长期的。否则只能算交易员，自欺欺人以为自己是投资者。不过，投资不仅要关注持有时间长短，分析时间长短同样重要。

对我们来说，身为投资者就要有态度，观察股票处理信息时都不能忘记。具体来说就是，应该想买入的企业刚好是上市公司，但心理上与看待私人公司没有什么不同。可以查看新闻、季报指导（别管其中描述是“很棒”还是“令人失望”）、分析师评级上升还是下降，还有不管屏幕上出现什么标题都要问一个问题：企业价值受到什么影响？

这种观点可以让人从思想上解放，处理新闻流开始采取不同的方式，对日常新闻垃圾的干扰也能产生抵抗力。季度收益不再只是“超过”或“不及”业绩指导。到最后只有一个简单的问题，“企业价值受到什么影响？”过滤90%的噪音，才能扎扎实实投资。（财富中文网）

本文作者维塔利·凯瑟尼尔森是投资管理协会有限公司（Investment Management Associates, Inc.）的首席执行官、注册金融分析师。他经常在ContrarianEdge.com网站上撰写有关股市的文章。他也是Wiley出版社出版的《横向市场小手册》(The Little Book of Sideways Markets)一书的作者。

译者：Charlie

审校：夏林

\Investors are prone to two opposing but equally debilitating fears: the fear of missing out when times are good, and the fear of loss when markets are volatile. These two fears have a zero-sum relationship with rational decisions. The more you are dominated by these fears, the less rational you are.

So what can we do, as investors, to move toward maximum rationality? Here’s one piece of advice: Turn off the TV.

We rarely turn on business TV in our office. Stock market movements throughout the day are completely random. The same actors that are influencing the up-and-down ticks of individual stocks–actors whose goals and time horizons may have nothing in common with yours–are driving market movements. I feel for TV producers who must provide a continuous narrative to explain this randomness.

Business TV presents additional dangers to your rationality: It reprograms you to think about the stock market as a game. In encouraging you to play that game, it puts you at risk of nullifying all the research you’ve done, as you let your time horizon dwindle from years to minutes.

It also threatens to strip from you the humility that is so needed in investing. Business TV guests who provide their opinions on stocks have to project an image of infallibility (the opposite of humility). Again, I sympathize with them – they are there to market themselves and their business, and thus they must project the image that they have an IQ of 200, holding forth on every possible topic.

You are never going to hear from them the words that are the essence of investing: “I don’t know.” Being unable to admit uncertainty is dangerous, because it may cause you to stop thinking about investing in terms of probabilities. If you start thinking that the future has only one path, you may ignore other paths and thus other risks in your portfolio construction. If you tell yourself that you’re an expert on every company, then your circle of competence has no boundaries and your overconfidence may take you to places (and into investments) where you have no place being.

Also, since “I don’t know” is not part of their vocabulary, business TV guests will confidently answer questions that should never be asked, such as “What will the economy and stock market do next?” If you have been investing long enough, it is hard not to develop opinions (hunches) about what the stock market and economy will do next. However, good money managers work diligently to extinguish these hunches from their investment process, because those hunches lack repeatability.

If you get the next leg of the stock market or economy right, that’s just dumb luck – nothing more and nothing less. Economic and stock market behavior, especially in the short term, are very random. God forbid your recent forecasting success goes to your head, because your ability to predict what will come next is not much different from your predicting the next card to be turned up in blackjack.

Be an investor, not a forecaster

My colleagues and I used to identify with our self-proclaimed “I am a long-term investor” brethren. However, over time this phrase has morphed to mean “I am a buy-and-hold (and never sell) investor.”

Also, the term long-term investor, in our view, is a bit redundant, since there is no such thing as short-term investing in the stock market. If you are investing in stocks, then your time horizon should automatically be long-term; otherwise you are just a trader deceiving yourself into thinking that you’re an investor. However, investing is not just about the holding time horizon. The analytical time horizon is just as important.

To us, being investors means having an attitude with which we look at stocks and process information. We buy businesses that happen to be listed on public exchanges, but our attitude toward them would not be much different if they were private. We view all news, be it quarterly guidance (whether it’s “great” or “disappointing”), upgrades or downgrades by analysts, or any headline crossing our screens in the context of one question: How does this impact the value of the business?

This perspective is liberating, because you start to process the news flow very differently. You develop a resistance to the distractions of the everyday news dump. Quarterly earnings stop being about “beating” or “missing” guidance. Ultimately, this simple question, “How does it impact the value of the business?” filters out 90% of the noise and puts us on a solid investment footing.

Vitaliy Katsenelson, CFA, is the CEO at Investment Management Associates, Inc. He writes about the markets at ContrarianEdge.com, and is the author of The Little Book of Sideways Markets (Wiley).