Joshua Roberts

speaker

181 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 26 Aug

Joshua Roberts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Cockroaches 1, Modi 0: India’s remarkable protests · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

So,

we can take some comfort from the fact that the people who do this day in, day out in Wall Street in the City of London actually are quite good at it.

markets can be both rational and completely wrong.

And what I mean by that is it may well be that markets aren't brilliant at predicting how much a company is going to earn in the future, how much the economy is going to grow in the future.

But if I'm a participant in markets...

I might not actually care about whether the prediction is accurate.

I might just care about making money.

So if I know that the market might incorrectly predict the future, but I think it's going to move in a certain direction, nevertheless, it makes sense for me to bet on that direction, even though it might lead to a price in the market that predicts the future incorrectly.

I think the biggest lesson from this study, though, is that

A lot of investors spend loads of time thinking about what they should be buying.

Which stock should I buy?

Should I buy this government bond or that government bond?

Should I lend to a massive company developing AI?

We devote a lot of thought to those things.

Almost, if not more important, is the question of how much.

How confident am I that the particular investment I'm making is going to pay off?

And can I quantify that?

And how should I size my bet in order to take advantage of my confidence?

This is actually possibly the most important question in investment.

And it's one that I think we give too little thought to.

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