October 2017

These Are the Goods

Articles 75% of households earning $112,000 per year or more have an Amazon Prime account. By Adventur.es Conflating prominent, but rare, events with high probability is an ongoing impediment to better investment returns. By Urban Carmel All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. By Jason Zweig This month is supposed to be…

Playing The Odds

Sam Ro is fond of saying “stocks usually go up.” The *chart below supports the statement that historically over time, stocks usually did go up. This is why it makes good sense for financial pundits to play on the bullish side. Usually they’re right, and when they’re wrong, so is everybody else, and misery loves…

I Don’t Think That Means What You Think it Means

Ask ten different investment professionals “what is evidence-based investing?” and you’ll get ten different answers. Not different variations, but completely different responses. One person’s evidence is another person’s nonsense. This is not unique to finance, it’s actually quite common that those closest to the source material will see things differently. In Life 3.0, Max Tegmark wrote about AI…

Shit Happens

There were two interesting charts floating around last week on the thirtieth anniversary of Black Monday. The first one below was produced by Eddy Elfenbein. Eliminating 1987 from this chart is a great way to visualize the fact that investors ought to focus on the long-term. Over these three years, and I understand that three years…

These Are the Goods

Articles I don’t know what kind of mood I’ll be in tonight, let alone 200 million strangers ten years from now. By Morgan Housel The human mind is famously inadequate at being able to see or predict parabolic value creation. By Vinny Lingham There is no firm behind Bitcoin; there’s simply code. By Nick Tomaino There’s panic…

They’re All Going to Leave

Stocks have been near all-time highs for a while now. The S&P 500 has gone 322 days without experiencing a 5% drawdown, colloquially known as a “pullback.” Stocks haven’t just been hanging out near all-time highs, they’ve been printing new ones daily. In 2017, 47 out of 201 sessions have closed at an all-time high….

But Not Too Much

There is a fine line between admiration and jealousy. We love watching people succeed, but not too much. It was easy to root for Tom Brady when he won his first Super Bowl. But outside of Patriots fans, was there a person in America that was rooting for him to win his fifth? We love…

Advice For Aspiring Traders

A frequent question asked of podcast guests is, “What do you know now that you wish you knew twenty years ago?” Twenty years ago I was twelve, but five years ago I was buying stocks that were going down and shorting stocks that were going up. I wish I knew how foolish this was. I…

These Are the Goods

Articles In years when Finra’s fee revenue exceeds forecasts and investment gains are strong, the regulator can rebate fees paid by firms it regulates. It hasn’t done that since 2014. By Dave Michaels Telling the difference between patience and stubbornness is incredibly hard. By Morgan Housel This is why we do what we do. By Tony…

The Price of Progress

We have two crises brewing. One will come to a head in my lifetime, the other in my child’s lifetime. According to a Washington Post article, The New Reality of Old Age in America, one in five Americans have no savings, and nearly 30 percent of households headed by someone 55 or older have neither a…