We suppose there are other news stories to discuss, but we can't help posting one more baseball-themed discussion in honor of the 2010 World Series victors, the San Francisco Giants. Having grown up watching Giants greats like Willie McCovey, Will Clark, Matt Williams and many others, this victory was very moving for your humble blog authors as well as for millions of other longtime Giants fans in the Bay Area and around the world.
There are many amazing things to say about this year's San Francisco Giants team and their savvy manager Bruce Bochy, who seemed incapable of making a wrong tactical or strategic move during the entire postseason. One that we feel is perhaps most valuable to point out to investors, however, is the fact that the "conventional wisdom" did not give the Giants much credit or much chance of winning.
In contrast to the conventional wisdom, the Giants not only won the division series, championship series, and World Series, but they made it look like they were completely in a league by themselves. This is stunning, and deserves consideration by investors, who are often subjected to "conventional wisdom" that is absolutely positive that some outcome is a foregone conclusion, and those investors should stop and think about how many times conventional wisdom has been completely and utterly wrong (remember the predictions of $200 oil in 2008?).
The San Francisco Giants were never "supposed" to make it to postseason play, let alone the World Series, according to many commentators. Of course, we know that the world of sports is full of surprises, and that Cinderella stories like the 2010 Giants have happened before, but take a look for example at this Sports Illustrated story from August 30 of this year, discussing the postseason prospects of various major league teams. Not only are the Giants not mentioned at all, but the article goes on to point out that coolstandings.com, a sports-oriented odds prediction site, gave the Padres (whom the Giants would later beat out to advance to the postseason) a 95.3% probability of winning their division and advancing to the playoffs --"the closest to a sure thing in the majors," the article's author said.
The rest, as they say, is history. We've written many times before about the fact that statistics and industry pundits and computer models and mathematical probabilities are all helpful tools, but that well-led, innovative groups of human beings often surprise all the naysayers (see for example this previous post, this one, and this one).
Our advice for investors has always been to commit investment capital to well-run businesses operating in fertile fields of growth, rather than trying to "play" some prediction about what is "certain" to happen next based on some computer program, statistical prediction, or the latest tenet of conventional wisdom. We think that this year's baseball season, and especially the spectacular postseason, can provide a memorable and colorful lesson in that vein for all investors.
Congratulations to the 2010 World Series Champion San Francisco Giants!
