Yet unlike large pension funds, which have powerful consultants to keep institutional fund managers in line, individual investors have no means of discouraging such capriciousness.
Even Mr Qaddafi, with all his dangerous capriciousness, must know it is only because of oil that Libya has been able to afford decades of damaging social experimentation.
They will be the first to remind that those who make ill-conceived solutions to imperfectly understood military problems, especially for political reasons, are never those who have to pay the price for their capriciousness.