“Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.” –Red, “The Shawshank Redemption”
If you ask my wife what puzzles her most about me, I imagine the short list would include my near-compulsion to stop on certain movies while channel surfing. I mean, I get it. How many times does one person really need to watch “The Martian” or “Tommy Boy”?
In my book, no movie is more re-watchable than “The Shawshank Redemption.” The 1995 Academy Award Nominee for Best Picture has it all: tragedy, comedy, and a great comeback story. Throughout it, a central theme is hope. For most of the movie, hope is characterized as a verb and a threat to the prisoner’s ability to cope with a life behind bars. In a key scene of the movie, the main character Red bristles at a notion put forward by Andy Dufresne that hope is a good thing, which makes way for the opening quote above.
I’m not trying to characterize investing as serving a prison sentence (though it can sometimes feel like it), nor am I saying that hope is a bad thing. However, the idea of NOT relying on hope as a strategy does resonate with me as a portfolio manager and trend follower.
