Joseph Moore

Well, there's two exceptions to that.

1840 to 1842, there's a brief experiment with bankruptcy law in America.

And we have those records.

And so we're able to go back through and say what worked and what failed.

And then of the people that failed, what did they do differently and did that succeed?

And what we find is that one of the most common threads of people failing as investors was they rushed out into something they didn't really understand that they'd heard was a hot ticket.

versus taking the time to study under somebody else who really understood that.

This happened again in the 1890s, I think, or 80s, 80s.

Teddy Roosevelt lost a ton of money in this.

Cattle investing in the Dakotas was suddenly the hot ticket because you could get 20-something percent returns annualized in cattle investing in the Dakotas.

And someone wrote a book saying you could get this.

And so many Harvard graduates quit and left and went to the Dakotas that Harvard Magazine tried to track them all down.

And one of them is Teddy Roosevelt, a young Teddy Roosevelt who goes out there hunting and he decides, I'm going to invest in this.

And he buys on the spot a cattle farm.

They all lost all their money.

I mean, Roosevelt basically just gave the cattle ranch away because there was no money left to be had in selling the land.

but none of them knew what they were doing.

None of them had ever done cattle before.

They didn't take the time to study the thesis and learn from people who'd done it and understand where the market, how it rose.

So I think the biggest takeaway there, take the time to get the education that would actually allow you to become an expert in this investment.