“The great investors bought vast quantities of art,” the firm writes.¹⁹ “A subset of the collections turned out to be great investments, and they were held for a sufficiently long period of time to allow the portfolio return to converge upon the return of the best elements in the portfolio. That’s all that happens.” The great art dealers operated like index funds. They bought everything they could. And they bought it in portfolios, not individual pieces they happened to like. Then they sat and waited for a few winners to emerge.”

艺术品行业做的就像指数基金。

“A lot of things in business and investing work this way. Long tails—the farthest ends of a distribution of outcomes—have tremendous influence in finance, where a small number of events can account for the majority of outcomes.”

Power law在投资中的体现，不仅是public market是这样，private market也是这样。推荐看看这篇关于天使投资回报的研究：https://www.angellist.com/blog/what-angellist-data-says-about-power-law-returns-in-venture-capital

Investment firm Correlation Ventures once crunched the numbers.²⁰ Out of more than 21,000 venture financings from 2004 to 2014:

  • 65% lost money.
  • Two and a half percent of investments made 10x–20x.
  • One percent made more than a 20x return.
  • Half a percent—about 100 companies out of 21,000—earned 50x or more. That’s where the majority of the industry’s returns come from.

这个数据也印证了power law

“Over the course of your lifetime as an investor the decisions that you make today or tomorrow or next week will not matter nearly as much as what you do during the small number of days—likely 1% of the time or less—when everyone else around you is going crazy.”

在人生的所有选择中也是1%的选择起到了决定性的作用，其实就是几个瞬间的事。但平时如何武装自己去准备那些不知道什么时候需要去做的选择是人们能做的。这儿还提到了一个有意思的点，当别人都在做疯狂事情的时候，如何控制自己做符合逻辑的事，是真正的天才。

“When we pay special attention to a role model’s successes we overlook that their gains came from a small percent of their actions. That makes our own failures, losses, and setbacks feel like we’re doing something wrong. But it’s possible we are wrong, or just sort of right, just as often as the masters are. They may have been more right when they were right, but they could have been wrong just as often as you. “It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important,” George Soros once said, “but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.”

当你做了正确的决定时，如何获取最大的收益也是非常关键的。这就有点像德州扑克，在关键手牌中，你拿着坚果，如何从第二坚果手中赢下最多的钱也很重要。另一个例子，如果你投的种子轮的公司有1个在A轮要被几家非常有名的VC投了，产品和利润增长都很可观，那是否使用pro rata rights追加投资就很重要了。