Articles Reading is incredibly important, but it won’t give you a big advantage over others. It will just allow you to keep up. By Andrew Thrasher There is nothing “normal” about the distribution of investment returns and nothing straightforward about arriving at a specific return number By Charlie Bilello CEO Reed Hastings has promised negative…

On this week’s Animal Spirits we discuss: This supply chain is an operation of great breadth, scope, and complexity 800 people are getting their jobs back Student loan debt is ____ IPO market is blistering hot JP Morgan’s guide is always great Don’t sleep on esports Siphoning annuity units to buy a sports team? Listen…

Tariffs. Trade wars. Over valued stocks. Late in the cycle. Rising interest rates. A flattening yield curve. Complacent investors. And yet here we are. The Dow is up 57 points this year. It’s easy to imagine a scenario where any combination of the above would cause stocks to fall 20% or more. It’s hard to…

Urban Carmel recently wrote “For all the time spent worrying about bear market risks, the overwhelming majority of short term traders and professional fund managers haven’t found a way to avoid it.” Today I want to talk about a systematic way to tune out the cacophony of people that proclaim to see the future before…

Articles For all the time spent worrying about bear market risks, the overwhelming majority of short term traders and professional fund managers haven’t found a way to avoid it By Urban Carmel Over 50% of Americans will find themselves in the top 10% of earners for at least one year of their lives By Ben Carlson When George Washington died in…

On July 6, 1981, Du Pont, the nation’s largest chemical manufacturer, announced its intentions to pursue oil giant Conoco. 80% of Du Pont’s products were based on petrochemical feedstocks, and when the energy crisis hit in the early 70s, Du Pont was exposed to serious losses. Its profits fell from $586 million in 1973 to $273…

On this week’s Animal Spirits, Ben and I discuss Buy high and sell low with index funds! Hedge fund fees fall to record low How to Launch and Build an Investment Fund The prophet returns (2009, video) Investing in personal-injury lawsuits Monetizing poor people But maybe payday loans aren’t so evil Finally, a bad guy…

The S&P 500 has gone 108 days without closing at an all-time high. This is the second longest drought since the index first made new highs in March, 2013. The chart below shows the days without an all-time closing high (red), the S&P 500 return (black), and new all-time closing highs (green). On March 28,…

One of the appeals of private investment vehicles is that they’re able to seek returns that are not correlated to traditional asset classes like stocks and bonds. One corner of this universe are personal injury lawsuits, which was recently covered in a story by the New York Times. Earlier this year, EJF Capital, a $6…

Articles Our feelings of certainty about things we’re right about is largely indistinguishable from our feelings of certainty about things we’re wrong about By Bob Seawright We see what we want to see By Nick Maggiulli Big words mask little thoughts By Morgan Housel The names of old dead guys don’t mean that much By…