Stock Picking Is Like Time Travel
Choose the right frame to assess a company’s future value, but brace for the glitches.
Tesla stock—bam! Apple—kapow! That sound you hear amid the market tremors is the future screeching back to the present, like the wail of the flux capacitor in Marty McFly and Doc’s DeLorean. Wall Street perfected this sort of time travel long ago: Successful investing is mostly about looking into the future and deciding what to pay for it today. But how do investors know where to look?
The equities side of Wall Street, including me, always writes off bond investors as automatons. Their business is straightforward: Bonds have...