Phineas Gage worked on a railroad construction crew in Vermont during the mid-1800s. While his crew was blowing up rocks using blasting powder to clear the way for a new rail line, a 13-pound iron rod was accidentally shot out from the explosion. It went through his cheek, left eye socket, and out the top…

On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: The debacle that is MoviePass. Why Disney’s streaming service will be so successful. Does it matter that Fidelity now has two index funds with no fees? Myth-busting the idea that everyone had pensions in not-too-distant the past. Why the pension funding crisis is something…

I put the following thoughts out on Twitter last Friday following the release of the employment numbers: I was a little shocked at the enormous number of replies that read something like this: Well, of course, we’ve had a long recovery and stock market boom. Central bankers have manipulated the markets higher for years now…

A friend gave me a book a few months ago to get my opinion on the investment strategy it was selling outlining. I gave it a read and didn’t get the best first impression. I’m not going to name the book because the name isn’t important. This could have been hundreds of different books or investment pitches….

This week Fidelity became the first fund company to offer index funds — a total U.S. stock market fund and an international stock market fund — with an expense ratio of 0%. Fidelity is a massive company that more or less missed the boat on index funds and ETFs when the first wave hit. This…

Slack is a lot like Twitter from my vantage point. It’s a service I use all the time. It’s become an integral part of my life from both a work and social perspective. Every time I talk to someone else who uses the service they share my love for the platform. And it’s almost impossible to explain its usefulness…

On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: Facebook’s massive stock price crash. Why my immediate reaction was to buy Facebook after its decline. Why being 30 is so much harder for the current generation than their parent’s. Is trend-following dead? The conflicts of interest that arise when hedge funds have internal…

Charley Ellis is one of my favorite people in the investment business. He seems to always have a similar message but I still come back to that message over and over again because of the way he delivers it. Ellis recently sat down for another chat with Ted Seides on the Capital Allocators podcast. He…

A podcast listener asks: It is my understanding that financial theory proposes that asset prices revert to their long-term mean. If so, does this conjecture apply to interest rates too? Mean reversion is probably one of the most misunderstood concepts in all of finance. On the one hand, it’s misunderstood by performance chasers who don’t…

A reader asked this week if I would update an old performance chart of the S&P 500 I used a few years ago. Here are the S&P 500 calendar year returns shown as a scatter plot: The red line is the average so you can see how wide the fluctuations are from year to year….