Spotlight: Investing During Uncertainty

If you have chosen to invest money in stock market, accept the fact that there will be times of uncertainty with no clear visibility into near future. Since you can’t predict what tomorrow will bring, you must be prepared for whatever it does. If you can’t stomach that, perhaps you shouldn’t be in the stock market at all.

There’s no question about the fact that it’s harder to see the future than the present. But the quest for certainty and longing to know the future is an old human endeavour. For centuries, people have been misled by looking for certainties where none existed.

Uncertainty creates acute mental discomfort and there are evolutionary reasons behind it. Before agricultural revolution, homo sapiens lived as hunter-gatherers. In the absence of steady food supply and the constant threat of wild animals, evolution hardwired human brain to resolve uncertainties about its environment. Agricultural revolution resolved the uncertainties about food and danger but opened up new avenues like diseases, famine, and natural calamities. The way the human race has dealt with these problems was to seek answers from authority figures.

Until 500 years back, before the scientific revolution started unfolding the layers that were hiding the secrets of nature, this thirst for certainty was quenched by religion and collective myths. Religion and its CEOs (priests, pope, godmen etc.), who claimed to have a direct connection with God, offered all answers to all the important problems. So, this tendency to equate knowledge with certainty is an old habit. As technology advanced, it gave birth to methods and tools where it became possible to remove a certain class of randomness from human life, like having more control over deadly diseases and adequate supply of food. Today, modern technologies, from mathematical stock prediction methods to medical imaging machines, have made us more confident about many unpredictable things.

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