Debunkery: Learn It, Do It, and Profit From It—Seeing Through Wall Street's Money-Killing Myths

INTRODUCTION

Debunkery Made Easy

What is “debunkery”? It’s a comberation. Decades back my wife started calling all the semi-understandable words I made up “comberations”—an operation that is part combination, part abomination and yet you know largely what it means. With debunkery, I hope you intuitively get that it’s myth debunking—with a twist.

The twist is that it’s a game, of sorts. Don’t take that to mean it’s not serious. In this book, we’re dealing with capital markets, investing, and money—serious topics. But games and play are part of how we learn. And debunkery—particularly in investing—is a game requiring dedication and practice. Why not have some fun on the way, if you can? So debunkery means unearthing truths or, at the very least, overturning common but widespread and frequently harmful market untruths, myths, and misperceptions most investors fall prey to.

But before going further, let me say that this book is not about some “how-to” system for beating the market. It doesn’t have a market-beating formula or even specifically tell you how to invest. If you want a serious primer on overall investing strategy, I refer you to several of my other books. This one is about improving your odds and making fewer mistakes by deploying debunkery.

If you read my 2006 book, The Only Three Questions That Count, this can be a companion book—more examples of those three questions at work. Or it can be an introduction for how to (correctly) stand conventional wisdom on its head, where ...