In their quest for world domination in your home, this week Amazon purchased a company called Ring which specializes in video doorbells and security cameras. The idea is that eventually people will allow Amazon to leave packages right inside your home. They purchased the company for more than $1 billion. The best anecdote from this…
Ben Carlson
Building a Sustainable Business in the Digital Age
This week I had the pleasure of giving a talk to the ACG Women in Finance group. Here are a few things I covered: Why women are better investors than men and why it’s so important to have cognitive diversity in your decision-making teams. Why the stock market is like Shark Week (the more you…
Some Finance Phrases I Find Annoying
One of the oldest tricks in the book for good financial salespeople (and those in any industry really) is to talk over people’s heads using jargon that makes it hard for others to understand them. Jargon is the often the preferred method of the financial community to make themselves sound more intelligent. ‘Just trust me, I…
Animal Spirits Episode 18: The Closet Indexer
On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: Our takeaways from the latest Warren Buffett annual shareholder letter. What happens to the Berkshire Hathaway share price when Buffett is no longer steering the ship? When stocks and bonds both fall at the same time. The coming baby boomer retirement crisis. What to…
Questions For the Next Bear Market
I wrote the following piece for Bloomberg a couple weeks before the start of the stock market correction that saw stocks fall 10% or so. If you’ve been listening to the podcast, we went over some of the answers to these questions but this was still far too short of a time frame to make…
Now & Then
This week I came across this new cartoon from Randy Glassbergen: This is deep. It perfectly encapsulates the conflict that occupies nearly every financial decision you make in your life (whether you want to admit it or not). There are people that take this inner struggle to the extreme. There are those people who save…
Talking Inflation & Interest Rates on What’d You Miss
This week I was on What’d You Miss talking with Joe, Julia, and Lisa this about how inflation and rising interest rates tend to impact stock market performance: Here’s the full piece for some more data behind these thoughts: Inflation is a Bigger Danger to Stocks Than Rising Rates There’s not always a perfect…
The Curse of Intelligence
Before I really knew anything about human behavior, incentives, and how the markets really work, I was always blown away by the sheer amount of intelligence I would come across in the investment world. Most of the people I’ve interacted with throughout my career are highly educated at some of the best colleges and universities…
Animal Spirits Episode 17: Phony Happiness
On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: How hard it is to predict what’s going to transpire over the short-term in the markets. The pros & cons of private equity. The phony happiness provided by private equity reporting. What would a permanent portfolio look like to us? Why picking an asset…
Inequality in the Stock Market
The stock market is one of the biggest equalizers in terms of leveling the playing field from a wealth perspective because it allows anyone with some money to easily invest in corporations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of stock market wealth is concentrated in the hands of the rich. In this piece I wrote for Bloomberg…
