It was a few years after the beginning of the Lebanese war, as I was attending
the Wharton School, at the age of twenty-two, that I was hit with
the idea of efficient markets—an idea that holds that there is no way to derive
profits from traded securities since these instruments have automatically
incorporated all the available information. Public information can
therefore be useless, particularly to a businessman, since prices can already
"include" all such information, and news shared with millions gives
you no real advantage. Odds are that one or more of the hundreds of millions
of other readers of such information will already have bought the
security, thus pushing up the price. I then completely gave up reading newspapers
and watching television, which freed up a considerable amount of
time (say one hour or more a day, enough time to read more than a hundred
additional books per year, which, after a couple of decades, starts
mounting). But this argument was not quite the entire reason for my dictum
in this book to avoid the newspapers, as we will see further benefits
in avoiding the toxicity of information. It was initially a great excuse to
avoid keeping up with the minutiae of business, a perfect alibi since I found
nothing interesting about the details of the business world—inelegant, dull,
pompous, greedy, unintellectual, selfish, and boring.