"Nobody can time the market"

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They expect an overall inflation rate of almost 3.5% for March and they think energy prices will shoot up again this month, bringing headline CPI inflation to about 4% for April. I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzher for Marketplace. To be clear, the big route for oil, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed and oil is up slightly this morning. 97.86 a barrel, it was $67 before the U.S. and Israel launched against Iran. Stock index futures are a little changed ahead of that inflation data. 500 orders a month was manageable. 5000 is madness! Embrace intelligent order fulfilment with ShipStation, the only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Go to ShipStation.com and use code START to try ShipStation free for 60 days. Dr. Malstreet argues that it's super hard to beat the stock market. Its author, Burton Malkiel, Princeton professor emeritus is still at it at 93. He joins us from New Jersey. Dr. Malkiel, welcome. Delighted to be with you. 13 editions of Random Walk. I have my dog-eared copy. I give a gift of your book to my kids when they were starting out. But for those new to it, professor, you make the case that what? Is it hard to beat the market averages by picking individual stocks? This was my thesis over 50 years ago when the book first came out. It was not really accepted at that time. A lot of professionals thought this was nonsense. But the fact of the matter is that with over 50 years of experience, we know that a simple so-called index fund, by which we mean a fund that buys all of the stocks in the stock market, does actually better than professional money managers. It's not that it's always right, but that the judgment of the market has been consistently shown to be better than the judgment of individual active managers. Now, none of this means you shouldn't tend to your portfolio. Keep an eye on it. Rebalance it. Don't just set it and forget it. About a year ago, we had the president announce Liberation Day. Huge tariffs on all foreign countries. The market collapsed that day. And a lot of active managers said, oh my God, it's the end of the world. We've got to go and sell all of our stocks. And then a week later, the president reversed himself and the market went back up. This is the problem. Nobody can time the market. And so, yes, you ought to look at your investments. You absolutely ought to care for them. But never, never, never think that you will be able to time the market and get in and out of stocks at the right time. I'm thinking of somebody, though. I mean, you do acknowledge that some people are okay at this. Some people have figured it out. It seems how to beat the market. You must have known the late Jim Simons, the mathematician at Stony Brook and hedge fund manager at Renaissance Technologies. I mean, he made a fortune for his investors taking advantage of market inefficiencies that his mathematical models seem to identify. To the extent that an inefficiency arises and someone can take advantage of it temporarily, it will eventually disappear. For example, over time, people determined that there was a so-called Christmas rally in the stock market. That is that the stock market would go up between Christmas and New Year's. Well, if that's true, what do I do as an active manager? What I do is I buy the day before Christmas and I sell the day before New Year's. But then I realized because other people are doing this, I have to go and buy two days before Christmas and sell two days before New Year's. And eventually that, quote, inefficiency will disappear. It is true that some active managers have taken a lot of risk and have been right. But it's also true that a lot of hedge fund managers have taken these kinds of risks and have gone bankrupt. Burton Malkiel, the author of what many consider the most influential book about investing of all time. It's called A Random Walk Down Wall Street, more than two million copies in print. He's Professor Emeritus of Economics at Princeton. Dr. Malkiel, thank you so much for this. My pleasure. My full conversation with Dr. Malkiel is streamable from Marketplace.org. I'm going to keep it with me at all times. It includes what to do if you think we're living in an AI bubble right now. Spoiler alert. The answer is not a lot. As for me, I'm staying at Marketplace, but just not waking up at 2 a.m. Pacific. I'm excited to move into a senior correspondent role here, covering future effects for us, taking the long view on policy, innovation, personal finance. Author and social critic Kurt Vonnegut once suggested in an interview with me that what we need is a secretary of the future, so I'm going to give it a whirl. I'm David Brancaccio. Talk with you soon. From APM, American Public Media. What happens when your kid's childhood becomes your business? I'm Rima Chres, and this week on This is Uncomfortable, we step inside the world of family influencers, where childhood turns into content and content turns into income. What does it do to the kids at the center of it all? And what does it reveal about modern motherhood? I think part of the reason that mom influencers and family vloggers are so popular in the United States specifically is because American motherhood is so lonely. Be sure to listen to This is Uncomfortable wherever you get your podcasts.