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Imagine you are watching two people in a coin-flipping contest. In investing, process is your approach, investment style, discipline and consistency, while outcome is your return or performance. In sports terms, think of process as your playbook and outcome as the final score. At the end of the day, outcome is who won or who lost the game, how many planes landed safely, what stocks went up or down and what surgical patients lived or died.
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Outcome is the result it could be due to skill, luck, intelligence or many other random factors. Process focuses on the specific actions that must be taken, regardless of the results. It could be a simple checklist or a complex systematic approach. Process is simply the methodology used to accomplish an undertaking. So what is process, and how does it differ from outcome? They can tell you what asset classes you should have owned last year, which hedge fund manager you should have invested with 20 years ago, and why you should have bought Netflix, Tesla and Apple about 5,000 percent ago. It’s called hindsight bias, and it afflicts investors, too.
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Sports fanatics are all Monday morning quarterbacks they can read you chapter and verse - after the fact - what should have been done late in the game on 4th and goal from the 2-yard line. Perhaps the biggest is focusing on outcomes rather than process. Sports fans and investors tend to make similar errors.