In investing, comedy, and business, timing is a key component of success. It’s not enough to have a sense of where the future is going, directionally – you have to have some sense of when it’s likely to arrive.
In investing, this challenge is perhaps seen most vividly in bubbles, as Gregory Zuckerman details in The Greatest Trade Ever, providing example after example of exceptionally smart people — from Isaac Newton to Stanley Druckenmiller — who were able to correctly perceive a bubble, but who nevertheless lost huge sums of money by inaccurately estimating when it would burst.