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With age comes some insight and as we head into 2025, now is as good a time as any to look back on some of the lessons from my investing career that have served me well. On the occasion last year of the publication of a (almost) comprehensive collection of my Investment Outlook essays going back to the late 1970s, I allowed myself some time for reflection. Not over the humility of calls that I got right or wrong, but what can be drawn from them now. In the big picture, American capitalism is in relative terms more reminiscent of the wild west than some economies. It allows for risk taking — backstopped of course in many ways by government and central bank policies but flexible enough to promote the modern entrepreneur in the quest for a profit. That promotion provides for, even encourages, risk and innovation. And in most cases, this also allows not just success but outright failure and bankruptcy. It is this lesson, I believe, that an investor must recognise and learn as we wind our way up the long-term mountain of portfolio management in this “new age”.