[seanhunter]

People often use that example, but Newton, for all he was unquestionably a giant of physics, was a bit of a weird dude and not 100% rationalist[1]. Additionally, just because he was a great physicist doesn't mean he knew anything at all about investment. You can be an expert in one field and pretty dumb in others. Linus Pauling (a giant in chemistry) had beliefs in terms of medicine that were basically pseudoscience.

Intelligent investor is a great book though.

[1] eg he wrote more than a million words on alchemy during his lifetime https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/project/about.do

[roenxi]

> ...was a bit of a weird dude and not 100% rationalist...

That covers everyone. Especially and including the rationalists. Part of being highly intelligent is being a bit weird because the habits and beliefs of ordinary people are those you'd expect of people with ordinary intelligence.

Anyone involved in small-time investing should be considering that they aren't rational when setting their strategy. Larger investment houses do what they can but even then every so often will suffer from group-think episodes.

[duskwuff]

> Newton, for all he was unquestionably a giant of physics, was a bit of a weird dude and not 100% rationalist

The norms of "rational" science hadn't really been established yet. There wasn't really a clear line drawn between alchemy and what we would consider chemistry today.

[seanhunter]

That is what I used to think, but if you dig a little deeper I'm not sure it's quite that simple. If you read the link I posted, all that work on alchemy was not printed after his death because people examined it and deemed it "not fit to print". So it definitely seems that even at the time, there may not have been a clear line, but people felt that his alchemical writings were on the wrong side of whatever line might in future be drawn.

Newton was also definitely in favour of an empirical/axiomatic basis for science in general. If you read principia he proves almost everything[1] and of course he famously deformed his own eyeballs with wooden gadgets to do his experiments in optics.

[1] In fact pretty much the one thing he doesn't prove is the calculus, which Alex Kontorovich once said in a lecture on youtube that he has a pet theory that the reason that Newton never published the calculus was not the one everyone says about his rivalry with Hooke etc but that he wanted a rigorous proof first (which of course didn't come about until much later with Cauchy, Weierstrass, Dedekind etc for normal calculus and the 1960s for non-standard analysis to prove Newton's fluxions rigorously).

[bbatha]

Newton knew a lot about investing for the time. He was a master of the mint for much of his adult life.

[seanhunter]

As I understand it, Master of the mint was more about knowing enough metallurgy to not be ripped off by people using weak alloys to smelt coins. It wasn’t like a modern central banker or anything like that.