Hi Tom,

Thanks, as always for your wise comments. Yes, I am in complete agreement.

Creativity and intuition (see next month's column) are the hidden, almost completely unappreciated aspects of investment management. Firms DO, in fact, pride themselves on a lack of creativity and humanity. It is as if they have taken Descartes' view of the world as an intricate machine for science to unravel as the actual state of the world. Consequently, they have attempted to remove every shred of humanity from the process in fear that the irrational will break the machine.

These stories always seem to end the same way: after disaster there is a revisiting of the initial flawed assumption that the world is an intricate machine. And a realization that machines are a poor proxy for the real world. After all, the greater the degree of free will in a system the greater the degree of uncertainty.

With smiles,

Jason