Peter Lynch agrees, adding that you learn all the math you need in the stock market in the fourth grade. “Success in finance remains an art rather than a science – if only because of the vagaries of human nature. But therein lies the good news: if investing is an art, it can be mastered,” states Leon Levy.
“Look at investing not as a science, but as an art. Always remember that it is better to be generally right than precisely wrong,” Bennett Goodspeed said. Peter Cundill also argues that markets can be overvalued and still rise or undervalued and still fall, and therefore investing is an art form, not an exact science.
“For me, what I’m paid to do is manage the dark art of risk management, I try to be a visionary and always have a dark vision of what can go wrong,” emphasizes Paul Singer. Managing an investment fund requires you to be part financial analyst, part accountant, part financier, part social scientist, part philosopher,” are the words of Daniel Loeb. Frank Martin says that putting “investment as a scientific genie back in the bottle threatens the professors who teach the mathematics of finance, who vastly outnumber those who teach investment management in psychology and sociology departments.”
Ed Wachenheim notes, “It’s imperative to be creative because stocks are selling at prices that the average investor thinks are right. So you have to come to the decision that the given prices are wrong and that the stock deserves to trade at higher prices for some reason. This thinking is creative thinking because other people don’t think like this. If other people thought like that, the shares would be at a higher price.”
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