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 read Sun Tzu for the warfare. The battles, the tactics, the ancient glamour of generals outsmarting each other across misty valleys. But the real genius of The Art of War has almost nothing to do with fighting. It is a book about when not to fight. About patience. About terrain. About knowing yourself
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 »
There is a strange little corner of economics that almost nobody talks about at dinner parties, and for good reason. It involves dead Irish peasants, a Scottish statistician with an unfortunate mustache, and a curve on a graph that refuses to behave. It is called the Giffen good, and if you are a value investor,
Why Value Investors Should Study the Potato Famine Read More »
The Strange New Ritual That Quietly Rewires Your Investing Brain Something peculiar happens the moment you tell fifty thousand strangers what you believe about a stock. The belief stops being yours and starts being your reputation. There is a strange new ritual in modern investing. A person finds a company they like, builds a model,
Most investors treat risk like a single number. One score. One verdict. Portfolio goes up seven percent, down seven percent, and the math says both moves were equally “risky.” This is the logic of standard deviation, and it is, to put it politely, incomplete. The Sortino ratio exists because someone finally asked an obvious question:
Sortino Surgery: 3 Moves to Cut Your Downside Without Touching Your Upside Read More »