"He began picking stocks in college. And he got good — extremely good. He beat the market decade after decade, earning billions in assets and a sandalwood mansion overlooking the Caribbean.
He was still young, barely flecked with gray. Yet he was ready for retirement. He just needed someone to manage his cash while he sunned on endless sands of white. But who could he trust? Most investors were too stiff in their thinking; they religiously followed past data, acting like algorithms instead of accessing their intuitions. The remainder were too dextrous — to a fault. They got seduced by imaginative speculation, leaving solid ground to flirt gratuitously with risk.
To feel safe in retirement, the stock picker wanted a financial planner who possessed his own savvy. But he didn't know where to look. What, exactly, was the mental skill that had made him rich? It was a kind of reasonableness, he was certain, yet it wasn't logic. Logic was too robotic, too stuck in past trends to anticipate fresh opportunities. What he was looking for was something else, a brainpower that accelerated plans when they were working — and pivoted swiftly when better prospects materialized. But what could that brainpower be?
I had an answer, derived from studying Operators who dominated in smooth times and choppy, outperforming both chance and date. The answer was: commonsense."
