Time & Perspective Quote by William Feather

Feather’s line lands because it punctures the stock market’s favorite myth: that prices are primarily the reward system for intelligence. He doesn’t call investors dumb; he calls the whole confidence game funny, which is sharper. “Every time one person buys, another sells” is a blunt reminder that most trades aren’t heroic discoveries of hidden value. They’re disagreements staged as certainty, with two people looking at the same asset, the same public information, and walking away equally convinced they’ve outsmarted the other side.

The subtext is psychological, not mathematical. Feather is aiming at the investor’s self-image: the urge to retrofit a narrative of skill onto what may be timing, temperament, or plain luck. “Astute” is doing the heavy lifting here. It’s a word people use about themselves when they want their choices to sound like judgment instead of preference. The joke is that markets allow, even encourage, symmetrical self-congratulation. You can’t both be right in the same way at the same moment, but you can both feel right, which is often enough to keep the churn going.

Context matters: Feather wrote in an era that saw the boom-and-bust drama of early 20th-century capitalism and the long shadow of the 1929 crash. In that world, faith in market savvy was both a cultural aspiration and a recurring humiliation. The quote isn’t anti-market; it’s anti-ego, a warning that the most dangerous position in finance is believing your trade proves your superiority.