8 Fascinating Reads: Express Scripts Holding Company (ESRX)

The new normal of retail
Financial blogger Josh Brown shares a chart from The Atlantic showing the decline in brick-and-mortar retail jobs since 2001:

Never gets old
Barry Ritholtz dug up a BusinessWeek story from February 2000. We now know that this was the prevailing view about a month before stocks and the economy peaked:

Time to celebrate. This month, the current economic expansion became the longest in U.S. history. The boom has done more than create millions of new jobholders and stock owners. It has also restored the public’s confidence and given more people than ever a shot at the American Dream. We tell the story.

Wisdom
Greenbackd found an old speech by Dean Williams of Batterymarch Financial Management packed with timeless insight:

Prediction: Most of us spend a lot of our time doing something that human beings just don’t do very well. Predicting things.

Forecasting: Confidence in a forecast rises with the amount of information that goes into it. But the accuracy of the forecast stays the same.

The importance of mean reversion: If there is a reliable and helpful principle at works in our markets, my choice would be the ones the statisticians call “regression to the mean”. The tendency toward average profitability is a fundamental, if not the fundamental principle of competitive markets.

How to win at investing
Bankers Anonymous shares the wisdom of the book Simple Wealth, Inevitable Wealth by Nick Murray:

Timing the market is a fool’s game, whereas time in the market will be your greatest natural advantage.

The highest value of an investment advisor is often to tell you to not do anything. This sounds a lot like advice from Benjamin Graham.

For the individual investor, bonds are an “anxiety-management tool” but not a wealth-building tool. Unfortunately — given current interest rates — this is truer now than it was when Murray first published his book in 1999. At this time, fiduciaries who depend on managing money in perpetuity cannot afford to be in bonds, a big, under-recognized problem — in my opinion.

The article 8 Fascinating Reads originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Morgan Housel.

Morgan Housel has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Express Scripts. The Motley Fool owns shares of Express Scripts.

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