Category: Investing
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Cars are stupid dangerous, for now. Investing works.
The two scariest moments of my life have happened in a car. Once I was driving and fell asleep at the wheel, ran off the road, woke up, overcorrected, spun around in the middle of a highway, and ended up on the other side without a scratch on my truck…
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Do less stupid things
When I started my career in public accounting, I had an obsessive tendency to believe that THE thing that would make me a better staff accountant would be to know more than other staff accountants. If I grasped the convoluted concepts in the Internal Revenue Code more quickly and more effectively…
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The un-usual way to make it as someone who spends money
Farhad Manjoo, the inimitable tech-writer at the New York Times, wrote a wonderful piece last week about MailChimp, the tech company responsible for helping lots and lots of small businesses do email marketing. The title of the piece is “MailChimp and the Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make It as a Start-Up,”…
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Is “financial literacy” useful?
Is that sacrilegious of me to ask? Maybe. I think there are multiple answers here, because the question is actually multiple questions. On the one hand the question is: Is “financial literacy” in its ideal format useful? And the answer to that one’s easy (though maybe not terribly practical): YES. I…
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Go with the grain
At the recommendation of a friend I’m reading Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons, which is a wonderful little book distilling some of the legendary golfer’s most fundamental thoughts about the game with laymen like me. Well, within about five minutes of starting the book I came across one of those thoughts that…
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Killer deer and cuddly fees
Aside from the occasional rabid deer, you’re not generally going to find one that poses any sort of active threat of violence. Eat everything in your garden? Sure. Gore you to death with their antlers? Not likely. Yet, who am I to argue with the Center for Disease Control? As…
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Football fans and investing pundits
At the beginning of a football season, football fans blow everything out of proportion. One bad series by the defense is indicative of a whole season of woe and doom. Three touchdowns in the first half by the offense and suddenly the Super Bowl seems a mere formality. It’s much…
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Sometimes persistence makes things worse
My wife, bless her, does not drink coffee. She hates coffee only slightly less than she hates cigarettes–which is a lot–and is, curiously enough, repulsed even by the SMELL of coffee. But coffee is one of the world’s greatest gifts, in my opinion, so I ask her almost every day…
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Biggie and emergent properties
Sometimes complex systems–like the human brain, or the universe that quantum physics studies–display what are called “emergent properties.” The phenomenon the term describes goes something like this: Suppose you have a widget that seems to be doing something fairly simple, and then you get a bunch of those widgets and put them together. You might understandably…
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“The counterpart to boredom is terror”
Boredom is complicated. On the one hand, boredom can be used to fuel creativity. On the other, it’s a black hole. But when the markets are boring for a long period of time, as they have been recently, many people who are invested in those markets don’t get bored. In…
Meaningful Returns 