Are You Brilliant, or Just Lucky?

Are You Brilliant, or Just Lucky? – WSJ.com.

This article applies insights from Michael Mauboussin’s new book entitled “The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports and Investing” to investment decision-making. I particularly like the author’s description of a classic experiment in which “… people guessed the outcome of a coin toss. When told they got the first four tosses correct, they concluded on average that they would be able to guess 54 of the next 100 coin flips.” In other words, people often fool themselves into attributing skill to pure luck.