The thali that never changes

About a year ago, I wrote a column comparing market experts to restaurants that advertise thalis with dozens of dishes. Every market fall, I observed, brings out a familiar spread of explanations – geopolitical tensions, FII selling, disappointing earnings, high valuations – each served with the gravitas of someone who has decoded the universe's deepest mysteries. I suggested treating such expertise as entertainment rather than investment guidance.

In fact, I recently came across something that made me realise I was being far too harsh on this entertainment industry built around the world of finance.

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Andrew Ross Sorkin's new book, simply titled 1929, is a meticulously researched narrative of the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression. What struck me most wasn't the drama of the crash itself – though there's plenty of that – but how familiar the debates leading up to it sound today. The thali of market wisdom, it turns out, has been on the menu for nearly a century.

In early 1929, as American stocks soared to unprecedented heights, a fierce public battle erupted between those who thought the market was dangerously overheated and those who believed the good times would roll on forever. Senator Carter Glass, one of the architects of the Federal Reserve, thundered against "stock speculation" and demanded that Charles Mitchell, the chairman of National City Bank (the forerunner to Citigroup), be disciplined for encouraging it. Paul Warburg, a respected banker who had helped create the Fed, warned about "orgies of unrestrained speculation" and predicted disaster.

The bulls hit back with their own thali. A Princeton economist accused Glass and his allies of "fanatical passions and provincial ignorance" and defended Wall Street as an "innocent community." A Virginia banker called on Glass to resign instead. Alexander Noyes, the financial editor of The New York Times, accused Warburg of "sandbagging American prosperity." Everyone had sophisticated-sounding reasons for their positions – credit conditions, industrial growth, the Fed's monetary policy, the transformative power of new technologies like radio and automobiles.

The script, in other words, was identical to what we hear today. Swap "radio" for "AI," "Fed fears" for "rate cut expectations," and you could publish these debates in tomorrow's business newspapers without changing a word. As Sorkin's book makes clear, each side was logical, well-articulated, and utterly convinced of its own correctness. The bears turned out to be right about the crash, but their timing was off by months, and many of them lost fortunes trying to short the market before it finally turned.

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Here's what I find most instructive: none of these expert debates mattered one bit to ordinary investors trying to build wealth over a lifetime. The person who started a disciplined savings programme in 1929 – investing regularly through the crash, the Depression, World War II, and every subsequent crisis – would have done extraordinarily well by 1960 or 1970. The person who tried to time the market based on expert pronouncements, whether bullish or bearish, would have driven themselves mad.

The debates themselves weren't useless in some abstract intellectual sense. Understanding monetary policy, credit conditions, and market valuations is genuinely important for policymakers and financial professionals. But for the retail investor trying to decide whether to continue their SIP or panic-sell their mutual funds, these debates are worse than useless – they're actively distracting. They create the illusion that successful investing requires keeping up with expert opinion, when in fact it requires precisely the opposite: the discipline to ignore it.

Nearly a hundred years separate us from the characters of Sorkin's book. We have algorithms now instead of ticker tape, apps instead of trading floors, and influencers instead of newspaper columnists. Yet the fundamental dynamic remains unchanged: experts will always have explanations, the explanations will always sound convincing, and they will almost never help you make better long-term investment decisions.

The next time you encounter a confident explanation for why markets moved – whether from 1929 or 2025 – remember that you're looking at a very old menu. The dishes may have different names, but the thali hasn't changed.

Also read: The market noise machine