Life & Wisdom Quote by Ron Chernow

A bull market is the perfect confidence trick because it recruits its victims as co-conspirators. Chernow’s line skewers the way rising prices don’t just pad portfolios; they rewrite personal identity. “Almost anything you buy goes up” is the key admission: the market’s generosity becomes indiscriminate, flattening skill into mere participation. When every pick looks prescient, the investor stops asking whether they’re right and starts believing they’re special.

The sentence pivots on “It makes you feel,” a subtle accusation aimed less at spreadsheets than at psychology. The subtext is that markets don’t only allocate capital; they manufacture narratives, and the most seductive narrative is self-authorship: I earned this because I saw what others didn’t. Chernow’s phrasing stacks “easy and safe” beside “financial genius” to expose how quickly comfort turns into grandiosity. Safety is the emotional alibi; genius is the ego payoff.

Contextually, Chernow is a historian of American capitalism and its mythmakers, drawn to the recurring drama where boom times blur the line between prudence and luck. He’s gesturing at the late-stage bull-market mood: newcomers piling in, risk models quietly relaxed, leverage rebranded as “confidence,” and caution treated as stodginess. The real target is not optimism but amnesia. Bull markets reward forgetting how markets actually work: that dispersion returns, correlations snap, and gravity eventually reasserts itself. Chernow captures the moment when the market stops being a place and becomes a mirror, reflecting back the most dangerous thing an investor can hear: you can’t lose because you deserve to win.