At Times, it Pays to Raise Your Head and Look Around

We believe this is one of those times.
‘Another bad day for oil,’ says Investor’s Business Daily. U. S. crude oil fell below $37 a barrel. The Dow fell 116 points. Neither of these events is significant. We report them merely to warm up. It is the last day of 2015; we look for a good way to ‘wrap up’ the fast-departing year.
Myth or Reality?
‘What if we’re wrong?’ we’ve been asking. As we proved yesterday, we err as much as anyone. But we spend more time than most trying to understand the ‘big picture.’ And we hope to be slightly more right than wrong at least about that.
But even this could be a trap. What if there is no ‘big picture’? What if it is just something we imagine… a vision created in our own brain… a myth, not a reality?
Some of the world’s most successful investors maintain that trying to see the big picture is a waste of time. Peter Lynch, for instance. Lynch ran Fidelity’s Magellan Fund for 13 years and made returns of 2,639% over that time. He liked to say that if you spent 13 minutes a year on economics, you wasted 10 minutes.
‘We can never know what is going on’ goes the argument. So, we’re better off investing our energy into researching individual stocks.

This post was published at Wolf Street by Bill Bonner ‘ December 31, 2015.