What could be a better way to grow old than to spend it doing something that you get better at, with age? Such as? It's easier to answer in the negative; any specialized skill or activity is unlikely to be performed better at 65 than 30. But why restrict the discussion to specialized skills? They are hardly befitting a gentleman.

Some people have a prejudice against investing, especially these days, but it could be the best example of an activity that one can become better at, with age. Let us relegate particular skills to the modern specialist-peasant--the Dilberts with a diploma--and consider the general qualities that would make an investor more successful, such as self-control, patience, independence from the herd, etc. Why shouldn't we improve at such things, with time?

An investor must play the odds about the future. How can he do that with no experience of the past, which is the case with a young investor? It is amazing what you can pick up from a lifetime of reading history that can be applied to investing; in the process the ideas become vivified. Without this effort at application, reading would be so sterile. And in applying an idea from history you feel liberated from the minutiae of the daily news.

Earlier I wrote about Arthur Koestler's book, "The Sleepwalkers." He wrote about the onset of the Scientific Age, one of History's most dramatic and fundamental changes. The Ptolemaic astronomy held sway for 1500 years, not because its practitioners were blockheads, but rather because they failed to connect astronomical observations with physics; they weren't concerned with cause and effect. Geometrical arcana was an end in itself, for them.

Doing my stock market homework I frequently run across what are called technicians or chartists. These modern-day necromancers believe that future prices in stocks are affected by the wiggles and squiggles of the past. Cause and effect mean nothing to them. They care nothing for what is happening to the companies in question or the general economy. It always brings a smile to my face to compare them to pre-Copernican astronomers, with their cycles and epicycles.