At Harvard Business School, I had a great investment management class with a professor who has schooled many of the best in the business. If an investment we were analyzing turned out to be a real dog, he would ask us "who do you sell this to?" and the class would shout "doctors!"
Doctors are clueless about investing because they know absolutely nothing about the world of business. They are not required to take any classes in accounting, finance, or economics, and then they work in a socialist sector of the economy.
Yet at the same time, doctors have huge egos. Part of it comes from making life and death decisions, and part of it comes from working at hospitals where everyone treats the doctors like they are superior beings. So they get it into their heads that they know everything, even everything about investing, when in reality they have no clue.
Stockbrokers love to have doctors as clients, especially the type of doctor who likes to think he’s a bigshot. The bigshot doctor feels like a real bigshot investor while the stockbroker churns away his account.
So when the author of Coyote Blog notes that he heard a dentist (even worse than a doctor) giving out residential real estate investing advice, this is a sure sign that we’re near the top of a housing bubble.
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