There is a quiet agreement in American life that nobody talks about at dinner parties. The real retirement system in this country is not the one run by the government. It is the one run by 500 companies listed on an index that most people could not name ten members of. Social Security, the official […]
There is a moment, familiar to almost anyone who has ever opened a brokerage app, where a falling stock starts to look like a gift. The price is down 30 percent. Then 40. Your brain starts whispering that this is the opportunity everyone talks about. Buy low, sell high. Simple enough. So you buy the
Why When You Buy the Dip, But the Dip Keeps Dipping Read More »
There is a particular kind of person who has never consistently made money in the markets but has figured out how to make a fortune teaching others to do what they themselves cannot. This is not a bug in the system. It is the system. Welcome to the guru industrial complex, where the product is
The Guru Industrial Complex: How to Spot a Fake Trading Coach Read More »
A brief history of how humans learned to bet on the future – and kept making the same mistakes Most people think of the stock market as a modern invention. Something that arrived alongside WiFi and financial news channels. But humans have been pooling money, trading shares, and losing their shirts in speculative manias for
There is something almost poetic about watching a government lose a fight with a number. Not a war, not an election, not a scandal. A number. A simple exchange rate that Britain insisted was correct while the entire planet disagreed. On September 16, 1992, the United Kingdom was forced out of the European Exchange Rate
Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to conquer Europe. What he actually conquered, without meaning to, was the way money works. The man who nearly unified a continent by force ended up unifying something far more lasting: the logic behind how investors spread their bets. This is not a story about Napoleon the general. It is a story
How the Napoleonic Wars Accidentally Invented Modern Diversification Read More »
There is a strange ritual that happens several times a year. The chair of the Federal Reserve walks to a podium, reads a carefully prepared statement, and manages to talk for thirty minutes without saying anything concrete. Reporters then spend the next 48 hours arguing about what was actually said. Markets move billions of dollars
Strategic Ambiguity: Why Central Banks Never Say Exactly What They Mean Read More »
You filled out a questionnaire. You clicked through five, maybe ten questions about how you would feel if your portfolio dropped 20%. You selected something like “I would stay the course and wait for recovery.” The algorithm gave you a score. You were declared a “moderate aggressive” investor. Congratulations. You now have a label that
There is a strange paradox at the heart of investing that nobody talks about at dinner parties. The best opportunities tend to show up dressed in the most boring outfits imaginable. They do not arrive with fireworks. They do not trend on social media. They sit quietly in the corner while everyone else is dancing
Why the Best Time to Buy Bitcoin is When You Are Bored to Death by It Read More »
The ancient Athenians had a word for it. They called it hubris. The dangerous belief that success was permanent, that the rules applied to everyone else, and that borrowed time was the same thing as earned time. Twenty five centuries later, in the spring of 2010, the modern Greeks discovered that the word still carried
Why Every Value Investor Needs to Study the Fall of Athens Read More »