비어즈타운 레이디스 클럽(The Beardstown Ladies Club)의 신화는 틀렸다?

A story about the Beardstown ladies. 

The Beardstown ladies were a group of gals that formed an investment club in a town in western Illinois in a little city of 20,000 people that was on the Mississippi river and they gained a lot on notoriety back in the late 80s and early the 90s because they were having fabulous investment results with their stock picks that they did in their investment club. Wall Street became enamored with this group because they were detached from Wall Street and it was thought to be the thinking of the average person out in the Midwest that wasn't affected by Wall Street and the banks and all of the influences that came with that. 

아더 인더슨이 '비어즈타운 레이디스' 클럽의 투자결과를 검사한 결과 실제 투자결과는 지금까지 알려졌던 것과는 달랐다는 것이다. - 이하 생략 -

These gals had a phenomenal track record until Arthur Anderson did an audit and found out that they didn't actually have the performance that they thought they had. They'd made a mistake and it was an honest mistake but it was a big difference in the performance. What Arthur Anderson found was that they not only under-performed the market but they'd under-performed the market pretty dramatically and taken a tremendous amount of risk to deliver that lower return. 

But to me the most interesting thing about the story wasn't that the pedestal they put the Beardstown ladies onto and the media push that was propelling them to the forefront. What was most interesting to me was what happened six months after the Arthur Anderson audit and a confession by the Beardstown ladies that they had made an honest mistake and they didn't mean to mislead anybody which I genuinely believe that they didn't, but to me the most interesting part of the story was what happened six months later. Six months later, the Beardstown ladies had another book deal that hit the market and it immediately went to a best seller. So, how can a book written by people that had so dramatically under-performed the market go immediately to the best seller list when there really wasn't anything there? 

And the most interesting part of the story in my mind is the behavioral finance aspect of it that tells us that we want to believe so badly that there is a guru out there; that there is somebody that can do this better than everybody else; that we will ignore all the documented facts, and I think it's a good lesson to learn that you don't want to be persuaded by some of these media people. That's the Beardstown ladies.