Artigo de 2014 do Ben Carlson, bastante interessante:
“Speculation has always been a part of the market and always will be.”"I look at speculation from a different angle. In my mind,
you become a speculator when you start making decisions outside of a well-defined process or don’t have one to begin with. If you have no plan, you are speculating. If you’re constantly shooting from the hip to make decisions, you’re a speculator.
If you’re paralyzed by fear every time the market goes down and you don’t know what to do with your portfolio, that’s a form of speculation. The same thing applies when you have no plan for how to handle a bull market (something many investors are grappling with at the moment).
Whenever I hear someone asks if they should be buying or selling stocks here, my initial reaction is that they probably don’t have an investment plan in place and they’re more or less just winging it. This doesn’t mean they won’t be right every once and a while, but
investing without a process is a sure way to lose money over the long haul, which is the only time frame that matters.
A systematic process is how you impose discipline on your lesser self, the one that makes all of the mistakes at the wrong times. Without a set of guidelines or principles to follow you’ll be constantly second-guessing every move you make after the fact. No one is right all the time, but
without a consistent process, you’ll be judging yourself against an impossible benchmark — short-term market fluctuations — a no-win situation.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t make any discretionary decisions within your portfolio, but
try to remember that the easiest person to fool is yourself. It helps to make it a high hurdle to be able to use judgment calls within an investment plan.
As Warren Buffett once said,
“Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” Having a systematic process mitigates this risk to a large degree. It doesn’t shield you from the risk of losses, but it does decrease the chances that you’re speculating with your life savings."
