I can’t take credit for this. It’s from one of my favorite writers, Seth Godin:
This is clearly and demonstrably true of mutual funds. It’s easy to confirm.
And yet…
We are very uncomfortable with randomness. So the newspaper does a 12 page section of mutual funds, filled with articles and ads and charts, all touting past performance.
Superstition is what we call the belief in causation due to a mistaken correlation of unrelated data. A broken mirror doesn’t actually cause seven years of bad luck, and cheering in a certain way isn’t going to help the Yankees, sorry.