As the oft-quoted saying of economist John Maynard Keynes goes, 'Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist'. Something similar may be said of ordinary retail investors, who might think their sole purpose and meaning in life is to make money, but are actually under the influence of some defunct philosophies.
Arcane metaphysics may be the last thing on the mind of a stock speculator. But it is striking how two of the most widely held investment doctrines resemble two influential philosophical schools of thought.
Value investing - the investment theory most popularly associated with stock market gurus Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett, with its emphasis on intrinsic value - sounds a lot like a philosophical school known as realism.
Its opposite is pure speculation, the one to which most Hong Kong investors probably subscribe. But even naked, unthinking greed - the belief that money is to be made in the shortest time by offloading inflated assets on someone more stupid - still believes in something. It denies there is such a thing as intrinsic value; or if there is, who cares? The denial of intrinsic reality - and its sister belief, that it is unknowable even if it exists - is a common feature of several diverse, even contradictory, doctrines that fall under the umbrella term postmodernism.
A philosophical comparison is not completely idle or absurd. If you examine some buried or hidden philosophical assumptions or biases that lurk behind some dark corners of investment strategies, they will have some influence on your buy/sell decisions, for better or worse.
Now back to the (metaphysical) school. Realist philosophers, from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell in the early phase of his development, believe there is an underlying reality - substances that underpin all appearances or phenomena. Philosophical analysis is the method to unearth the nuggets of gold (realities) that underpin appearances.
Similarly, fundamentalists - followers of Graham and Mr Buffett - believe the fundamentals of a public company underpin the intrinsic worth of its shares, its true price as opposed to its market price.