On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: The new Howard Marks book. Do super-investors like Marks & Buffett actually do more harm than good? The humble beginnings of the first Vanguard index fund. How to call a market top without calling a market top. How SoftBank’s vision fund will impact the VC…

I was looking at the best-selling investing books on Amazon the other day and it always amazes me how old some of the books are on this list: Rich Dad, Poor Dad was published in the 1990s. The Intelligent Investor was originally published in 1949. The Millionaire Next Door was 1996. Dave Ramsey’s book came…

…for a while? It’s not without precedent that the stock market can go long stretches in the absence of an enormous market crash. Benjamin Roth was a young lawyer in Ohio during the Great Depression. He kept a diary throughout this trying period which was eventually turned into a book called The Great Depression: A…

After reading one of my pieces someone recently commented that my whole schtick is simply pointing out how hard it is to invest successfully. This was meant to be a put-down but in some ways it’s true. I write a lot about how hard investing can be because it is hard. Anyone who tells you it’s…

One of the oddities of the information age is that it hasn’t really led to an enlightenment of knowledge. In many ways, the firehose of information has made some people less informed. There are people who believe the earth is flat, the moon landing was a hoax, and Australia doesn’t exist. But beyond the conspiracy…

On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben we discuss: Why losses in the bond market can sting. Do stocks diversify bonds? Jeremy Siegel says stocks are undervalued relative to bonds. Can bonds really be overvalued? Do rising interest rates really hurt stocks? Will we buy the new Amazon Alexa microwave? Pot stocks and mini…

There’s a lot of overvalued financial advice out there these days. Don’t drink lattes or you’ll never be able to save for retirement. You should make your own toothpaste to save more money. Just follow my simple system to get the highest interest rate on your savings account. There’s nothing wrong with cutting back, being…

In Gary Shteyngart’s new novel Lake Success, the protagonist is a wealthy hedge fund manager named Barry who has a complete lack of self-awareness. Shteyngart’s storytelling in this book is wonderful but when you read it the theme of wealth inequality slaps you in the face throughout. At one point in the story, Barry and his…

On this week’s podcast we discussed some stats from a recent Bloomberg piece about the lottery: The lowest-income households in the U.S. on average spend $412 annually on lottery tickets, which is nearly four times the $105 a year spent by the highest-earning households, according to a study released on Wednesday by Bankrate.com. And almost 3 in 10 Americans…