Nearly 20 years ago, at the beginning of one of the biggest bull runs in global history, a top investor had told me that I was too much of a ‘Bong intellectual’ to make money in the markets.
“The stock markets are driven by animal spirits,” he had said. “People who buy stocks are inherently optimistic. They are willing to take risks. You are the exact opposite.”
Twenty years later, my bank balance shows that he was right.
I lacked the necessary ‘animal spirits.’ It is a term that was popularised by economist John Maynard Keynes, who used it to denote the “spontaneous urge to action, rather than inaction,” that drives human enterprise.
But, it seems, I am not the only one without an entrepreneurial mojo. If Uday Kotak is right, then GenZ in business families have also lost their animal spirits. Kotak says that he often meets young people “managing family offices and investments, trading in stock markets, allocating funds to mutual funds, and treating it as a full-time job.”
He is worried that young people are becoming passive “financial investors too early in life,” instead of creating ‘real-world’ businesses. Are they?