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I read an article today in the Wall Street Journal about a woman who found out she had breast cancer from an automated email generated from some testing she had done. She was the one calling her doctor about the results rather than vice versa, simply because the flow of information was always on and
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A nearly constant temptation in the world of money is to over-optimize for taxes, or returns, or safety, or income, or leisure, or political preference, or whatever it is that floats your boat. It’s a temptation because the idea of optimization seems inherently good, and indeed there are many things you can and should optimize
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In a 2018 conversation, economists Tyler Cowen and Daniel Kahneman had the following exchange re: part of Kahneman’s research: COWEN: You also have a paper on happiness with Alan Krueger, using what you call the Day Reconstruction Method — how much people enjoy different experiences. One result from that paper is how much people enjoy spending time with their
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Sometimes our spending becomes like the mindless scrolling we often engage in with our phones. When this happens, I think there are a couple of things that can be helpful: Both of the above are basically a tactical way to get our minds back into the game, kick-starting our awareness and focusing our boredom not
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It’s amazing how often we are tempted to hold on to over-concentrated and risky positions given that: 1. There is an overwhelming body of research showing we take losses to heart much more fully than we appreciate wins, 2. The likelihood of a win for a particular stock is small, and 3. We don’t need
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After a certain point, so much of what we spend our money is just signaling, and I don’t know that there’s anything we can do to prevent that. But what exactly are we signaling? What does the spending past our basic needs communicate to ourselves, our kids, our communities? What if we tried to signal
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Investing and tracking the performance of your investments are two very, very different things, and the less time you spend on the latter, and the more regularly you commit to the former, the better off you will be. Investing is essentially taking money that you would have either spent on consumption (clothes, cars, furniture, country
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My vehicle is due for a regular oil change, but I’m not going to change it. My dad taught me how to change the oil in a car when I was 17, but I’m still not going to. Why? Because it would take me a lot more time than it would a professional, it would
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Sometimes choosing the simple act that we know will work is the most frightening choice we can make, so instead we go with a more convoluted, round-about, less effective, perhaps even detrimental option. Because it doesn’t frighten us. This is the reason ridiculous diet fads will never die; the reason illiquid, complex, “part of the
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The business headline in today’s Wall Street Journal reads: “Apple Value Surges to $1 Trillion.” And “What does it mean,” wrote Matt Levine today, “that Apple is worth a trillion dollars? I think there are two possibilities: The consensus expected future cash flows to Apple shareholders have a present value of $1 trillion; or Other
Meaningful Returns 