The Fourth of July is going to feel weird this year. Several years ago we moved to a house very close to the parade route of a neighborhood Fourth of July parade that has been a mainstay for decades. We turned these morning parades into our own tradition. We would invite any of our friends who were hardy enough to wake up and come over for a 9am parade on a day off, serve bagels, breakfast tacos, coffee, juice and/or mimosas, and watch the various scout troops, school and civic groups, and the famous Lawn Chair Brigade march by while enjoying the reverie and each other’s company. Not this year. Add this disappointment to the mountains of missed graduations, cancelled proms, deferred vacations and postponed plans great and small that we have all lost to the pandemic. Worse still, there appears to be no end in sight. The best hope we are given is that a safe and effective vaccine will be developed, tested, approved and made available “soon”.

An article I saw in The Wall Street Journal before the holidays really hit home with me on issues around aging, health and lifestyle. More Than Ever, Americans Age Alone, published two weeks before Christmas, profiles several baby boomers to illustrate a larger trend of aging alone, and the risk that doing so poses to health and happiness. The article claims that loneliness “is as closely linked to early mortality as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day or consuming more than six alcoholic drinks a day, and goes on to say that eight million Americans that have no close kin, a figure that is expected to rise. The author attributes this statistic to the fact that “[t]he baby boomers prized individuality and generally had fewer children and ended marriages in greater numbers than previous generations.” Isolated adults “are at an increased risk of depression, cognitive decline and dementia, and...social relationships influence their blood pressure and immune functioning, as well as whether people take their medications.”

Original Publication Date: April 14, 2016

Key takeaways:

• The typical stock picking contest, while often promoted as a test of skill, takes place over too short a time period for the effects of skill to overcome those of luck. Real-world investing is a process that unfolds over decades, not months or single years.
• Numerous business schools promote versions of the stock picking contest which are either pitch competitions which inevitably consider presentation skill over idea merit, or suffer the same timeframe shortcomings as a typical stock picking contest.
• My proposed contest model would teach longer term thinking around investment selection and potentially increase attendance at class reunions.

We humans sure love contests! For millennia we have entertained ourselves with contests based on luck, skill, or some combination of both. Luck-based contests such as lotteries and sweepstakes provide entertainment but say little about the winners’ merit. In pure skill or talent-based contests, such as racing in all its forms (100 meter dash, 200 meter butterfly, the Indianapolis 500), winners are determined by a single objective criterion - fastest to finish. Most contests that gain our attention and interest, however, include some combination of luck and skill, such as singing and dancing competitions where talent is important but winners are determined by judges’ scoring or a form of voting rather than an objective criterion like fastest time. (There is an interesting derivative argument a group of my friends has had over many years around what defines a sport versus an athletic competition, the conclusion of which is available here.)