Investors are terrible at forecasting wars

NATHAN ROTHSCHILD was in Waterloo when British troops cornered Napoleon’s into their final defeat. The banker quickly grasped an opportunity to turn field intelligence into financial gain. Having rushed back to London, he spread rumours that Wellington had lost, rocking markets, and picked up heaps of assets on the cheap. Then the real news reached Britain, and he reaped millions of pounds in profit.That lurid story, published in an anti-Semitic pamphlet long after the battle, has little truth to it. Rothschild was not at Waterloo. No one knows if he made money in the aftermath, and certainly not what would have been an unthinkably large sum at the time. But the legend is also wrong in general. Rather than profiteering, most investors lose money during wars, because they fail to see them coming.