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Comment by VexXtreme

You have fallen victim to the outcome bias. It is a mistake to attribute the quality of a decision to a specific outcome when the correlation between their determinants is low or unknown. In layman's terms, you don't know that it was her joining Google that led to this particular rise in Google's market cap. It could have been any other number of factors. Even simpler, what you said can be analogized to "I won the lottery while wearing this particular shirt, so it must be my lucky shirt".

Furthermore, statistics show that there is a positive correlation between companies rewarding executives in a bull market, and punishing executives holding the exact same positions in a declining market, thereby making luck and timing, not skill, a main determinant of who eventually makes money (the correlation between how well a company performs and the perceived skill of its executives was determined to be around 10-20%).

parent VexXtreme 10 years ago

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