"If stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stock, not selling advice"
About this Quote
Augustine lands the jab with boardroom calm: if you truly possessed a repeatable edge in the market, you would monetize it by compounding your own capital, not by hawking newsletters, cable hits, or “pro” subscriptions. The line works because it weaponizes basic incentives. Advice is positioned as a product like any other, and the quote invites you to ask the impolite but essential question: who benefits if I follow this guidance?
The subtext is less “all experts are frauds” than “the market punishes certainty.” Real informational advantages are rare, fleeting, and hard to scale without evaporating. Selling advice, by contrast, scales beautifully: the marginal cost of one more subscriber is low, and the revenue is steady even when the predictions are not. Augustine’s cynicism is practical, not philosophical. He’s pointing at the asymmetry between outcomes and accountability: pundits can be wrong indefinitely, while investors eventually meet the scoreboard.
Context matters: Augustine is a longtime defense-and-aerospace executive and public administrator, a veteran of institutions where risk management and incentive design aren’t abstractions. That background gives the quip its corporate bite. It’s less a populist sneer at Wall Street than an engineer’s sanity check on the business model of expertise.
The punchline also anticipates today’s attention economy. “Expertise” becomes content; volatility becomes marketing; confidence becomes the commodity. Augustine’s advice is really about epistemic hygiene: trust the people whose incentives align with being right, and be suspicious when the main asset being traded is your belief.
The subtext is less “all experts are frauds” than “the market punishes certainty.” Real informational advantages are rare, fleeting, and hard to scale without evaporating. Selling advice, by contrast, scales beautifully: the marginal cost of one more subscriber is low, and the revenue is steady even when the predictions are not. Augustine’s cynicism is practical, not philosophical. He’s pointing at the asymmetry between outcomes and accountability: pundits can be wrong indefinitely, while investors eventually meet the scoreboard.
Context matters: Augustine is a longtime defense-and-aerospace executive and public administrator, a veteran of institutions where risk management and incentive design aren’t abstractions. That background gives the quip its corporate bite. It’s less a populist sneer at Wall Street than an engineer’s sanity check on the business model of expertise.
The punchline also anticipates today’s attention economy. “Expertise” becomes content; volatility becomes marketing; confidence becomes the commodity. Augustine’s advice is really about epistemic hygiene: trust the people whose incentives align with being right, and be suspicious when the main asset being traded is your belief.
Quote Details
| Topic | Investment |
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