There is a strange paradox at the heart of modern investing. We live in an age where information is infinite, opinions are free, and every person with a phone can trade derivatives while waiting for a burrito. Yet many investors, professional and amateur alike, lose money or barely match the market. The problem is not […]
Building Your Circle of Competence: Why Specialization is Your Best Asset Read More »
The Casino Joke That Explains Everything About Diversification There is an old joke in finance that cuts deeper than most textbooks. A man walks into a casino, places everything he owns on red, and wins. He is called a genius. Another man walks into the same casino, spreads his chips across red, black, green, the
What’s More Dangerous: No Diversification or Bad Diversification? Read More »
There is a quiet war happening in finance, and most investors do not even realize they have already picked a side. On one end sits the S&P 500, the default choice, the index so dominant that “just buy the index” has become the investing equivalent of “drink water and get some sleep.” On the other
There is a particular kind of guilt that comes with investing. You hand your money to a brokerage, it flows into companies you have never visited, and somewhere a factory hums a little louder. ESG funds were supposed to fix that. They promised a world where your portfolio could grow and your conscience could rest.
Why the Best ESG Strategy is Just Buying the S&P 500 and Planting Trees Yourself Read More »
There is a particular kind of investor who has been waiting since 2016. They watched the market climb. They watched it stumble in 2018 and thought about buying. They watched it crash in 2020 and froze. They watched it recover faster than anyone expected and told themselves the next dip would be the real one.
The “Wait for the Dip” Delusion: A Masterclass in Procrastination Read More »
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
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
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 »
There is a quiet insult buried in the word average. Nobody dreams of being average. No child raises a hand in class and says they want to grow up to be ordinary. The word carries the weight of mediocrity, of settling, of giving up on something better. And yet in investing, average is where fortunes
Why “Average” is Actually an Elite Financial Result Read More »
Most people think their career is the main thing. The job title, the salary, the corner office or lack of one. They protect it, optimize for it, lose sleep over it. They treat the career as if it were the asset itself. It is not. Your career is a derivative. It derives its value from
Why Your Career Is a Derivative and You Are the Underlying Asset Read More »