QuestionerI know you don't like to forecast the equity markets, but maybe you would dare to forecast the evolution of the debate between proponents of the efficient market theory and value investors? The market is generally, you know, to me, it's almost self-evident if you've been around markets for any length of time, that the market is generally fairly efficient. It's fairly efficient as pricing between asset classes. It's fairly efficient in terms of evaluating specific businesses. But being fairly efficient does not suffice to support an efficient market theory approach to investing or to all of the offshoots that have come off of that in the academic world. So if you'd believed in efficient market theory and been taught that and adopted it for your own 20 or 30 years ago or 10 years ago, I think it probably hit its peak about 20 years ago, you know, it would have been a terrible, terrible mistake. It would have been like learning the earth is flat. It just, you would have had the wrong start in life.
CharlieNow, it became terribly popular in the academic world. It almost became a required belief in order to hold a position. It was what was taught in all the advanced courses and a mathematical theory that involved other investment questions was built around it, so that if you went to the center of it and destroyed that part of it, it really meant that people who'd spent years and years and years getting PhDs found their whole world crashing around them. I would say that. that it's, I would say that it's been discredited in a fairly significant way over the last decade or two. I mean, you don't hear people talking the same way about it as you did 15 or 20 years ago. It's hard, though, it's very interesting. It's hard to dislodge a belief that becomes sort of, becomes the dogma of a finance department. It's so challenging to them. And, you know, they have to, at age 30 or 40 to go back and say what I've learned up to this point and what I've been teaching students and all of that is silly. That doesn't come easy to people.