Complacency throws markets off course

STUDENTS of statistics and other social sciences would be familiar with the phrase "regression to the mean" that broadly means there is a long-term equilibrium towards which phenomena will tend towards.

The person who discovered it was 19th century scientist Francis Galton who found that tall men were more likely to sire shorter sons and that short men were more likely to father tall sons, as if some mysterious force was causing human heights to move away from extremes towards some kind of average for all humans.

This of course makes perfect sense because if tall men had tall sons and short men short sons, then the world would eventually be filled with very tall and very short men with little in between.