If you’re in the investing world long enough, you’ll eventually get tempted to put your money into some new investment or try to tweak your portfolio to outperform the market. It’s easy to get lulled into an idea that you can beat the markets if you just do enough research, just make enough trades, just own the right funds, just follow the right market prognosticator, etc. But what you’re really doing when you try to beat the markets is moving from the realm of investing to speculating. And when you speculate, you take the chance you may beat the markets, but you also take the chance that you may not.

So in this vein, I went back and found a short segment of what I feel is one of the core ideas behind the Permanent Portfolio from Harry Browne himself. I think this little two minute clip captures a fundamental truth in the investing world about why you need to be skeptical and why you should understand the differences between investing and speculating:

Harry Browne the Skeptical Investor

This clip was taken from Harry Browne’s radio show on October 31, 2004.