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Peter Bernstein on Amaranth: Better to be Wrong Than Too Right

Written by: Paul Kedrosky

Article Overview: Peter "Against the Gods" Bernstein has delivered the most choice quote so far on the Amaranth hedge fund meltdown:

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Peter Bernstein on Amaranth: Better to be Wrong Than Too Right

Peter "Against the Gods" Bernstein has delivered the most choice quote so far on the Amaranth hedge fund meltdown:

"What happened to that hedge fund shows that when you're really right, you always overstay the position and that's when you get murdered. It's better not to be right so much.''

It's a lovely quote, and so spot-on. Diane Vaughan called it "normalization of deviance" in her classic book on the sociology of risk, but the gist is the same: Humans who are rewarded too often for taking ill-understood risks (or at least are not penalized) normalize the risk, and then take on even more risk. One day, of course, the whole edifice almost inevitably comes crashing down, sometimes literally, as in the case of the low-temperature launch of the space shuttle Challenger, which is Vaughan's subject.

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Home > Entrepreneur-Advice > Paul Kedrosky > Peter Bernstein on Amaranth Better to be Wrong Than Too Right
Article Tags: amaranth hedge fund, deviance, diane vaughan, edifice, gist, launch, low temperature, meltdown, peter bernstein, risk, sociology, space shuttle challenger

About the Author: Paul Kedrosky
RSS for Paul's articles - Visit Paul's website

Dr. Kedrosky is currently the Executive Director of the William J. von Liebig Center in San Diego, California. Using an innovative seed capital program, the Center catalyzes the commercialization of technologies from the internationally-ranked University of California, San Diego. Dr. Kedrosky is also a venture investor with Ventures West, Canada's largest institutional venture capital firm, where he is most active in consumer technologies and software. He is currently on the board of Marqui Corporation, a marketing automation software company.

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