The Four Most Dangerous Words... The late great Sir John Marks Templeton - of Templeton Growth Fund fame - once quipped that the four most dangerous words to an investor were: "this time is different." Many market strategists warn that the sky is falling or that the investing principles that worked in the past no longer hold true in this new world of artificial intelligence and political unrest. The truth is that the facts and situations are (slightly) different from anything in the near or distant past. The rest of the story is that the human reaction, however, is the same and reasonably predictable. Read MORE ! Mean Reversion Works In my blog post two weeks ago, I used the analogy of a spring traveling through time while being exposed to compression and extension forces. This spring never gets smushed into a pancake - just the way it never snaps in half. When the forces are briefly taken away, the spring reverts back to the normal (unforced) state. This same principle can b