Jonathan Clements wrote my favorite personal finance book of 2016 — How to Think About Money. People have an odd relationship with money because we spend most of our time stressed out about it. This book does a great job of trying to get people into the right frame of mind about their financial decisions and using…

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.” – Jim Carrey Tim Ferriss always asks his podcast guests who the first person is that comes to mind when they hear the word ‘success.’ Derek Sivers gave a deeper answer than most….

“The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on.” – Brian Wansink Of all the analogies that get thrown around on a regular basis about investing and finance — sports, gambling, Seinfeld, piloting a plane, movies, etc. — by far the most accurate for my money is dieting and weight loss. The equations…

The Wall Street Journal had a story yesterday that highlights the dominance of U.S. stocks over the rest of the world in the past few years: Since 2012 alone, the U.S. share of global stock market capitalization has risen from roughly 35% to just over 40% of the total. I tweeted out the following this morning, which…

AQR is arguably one of the top fund firms in the world right now. They manage over $170 billion in a wide variety of quantitative investment strategies. They are able to marry financial research with real-world investible strategies as good as anyone in the marketplace. While they began as a hedge fund firm that catered…

In a recent post I quoted Warren Buffett who said, “The most important skill in finance is salesmanship.” I said that I completely agreed with this statement, but it took me a while to come to this understanding. A few people asked so I decided to expand on these thoughts. I always used to assume that sales were…

Last week my colleague Michael Batnick pointed out that small cap stocks have seen the equivalent of both a bear and bull market this year alone: The people that use all-time highs to scare you are the same people who told you that the 27% selloff in the Russell 2000 earlier this year was the…

Predicting crashes, recessions, black swans and such has become fetishized by many in the investment world since the Great Financial Crisis. Those who predicted trouble prior to 2008 have had a hard time letting go of that one right call and plenty of those who missed it have been trying to make up for lost…

At our conference last week I moderated a panel on the topic of organizational alpha. This is the idea that adding value to an investment portfolio goes far beyond trying to outperform the market. Traditional alpha is a finite resource and can be fleeting. Organizational alpha is something that every individual or firm can adopt to…

I spend a ton of time reading and most of it ends up falling in the interesting, but not very useful category. And that’s okay — not everything you read is going to be groundbreaking. This week I did come across two research pieces that I thought were very useful and wanted to share some…