Investing success is a matter of temperament rather than IQ — the binding constraint is behavioural, not analytical.
Graham states it once and returns to the numbers. Housel wrote a whole book on this sentence, and Goleman supplied the longitudinal evidence for it from an entirely unrelated direction.
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Typed edges. Anything below the line was authored on the other note and derived here.
supports →Aim for reasonable rather than rational — a slightly suboptimal plan you will actually stick with beats an optimal one you abandon.If the constraint is temperament, then a plan chosen for stickiness rather than optimality is not a compromise — it is solving for the actual bottleneck.
← supported bySelf-regulation predicts later outcomes better than IQ does.
Graham asserted this about investing from the armchair in 1949. Here is the longitudinal evidence for the general claim, arrived at from developmental psychology with no knowledge of the first.