In the wake of the recent college admissions bribery scandal that ensnared Aunt Becky and a whole host of other wealthy people, there were generally two takes from the content/social media apparatus: (1) College is a meritocracy that benefits the rich. It shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone that rich people pull strings to get…
This week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben is sponsored by YCharts: Mention Animal Spirits and receive 20% off your subscription price when you initially sign up for the service. We discuss: What Congress doesn’t understand about financial services. The college admissions bribery scandal. Does it matter where you went to college? Can tech companies solve higher education?…
The late-Peter Bernstein once wrote, “The market’s not a very accommodating machine; it won’t provide high returns just because you need them.” When you do need higher investment returns because of a perceived shortfall in assets for a specific goal you generally have 3 options to remedy the situation: (1) Adjust your expectations, and therefore,…
Today’s Animal Spirits: Talk Your Book is presented by Invesco: We discuss: What is the low volatility anomaly? Why financial theory doesn’t always translate into the real world The three behavioral and structural reasons for the low vol anomaly How often do different factors overlap with one another? How the market environment impacts low vol…
Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton have been publishing the following chart in their annual update for some time now and every single year it blows me away: The U.S. market share looks like Pac Man preparing to eat the rest of the world. Michael and I discussed some of the reasons for the U.S. dominance…
Behavioral finance is still only a few decades old at this point because the finance industry was a little late to the game in understanding that investment decisions are driven almost exclusively by human emotions and biases. Now that human psychology has grown in importance in the field, the bible to anyone serious about understanding…
When my wife and I discovered we were having twins I knew my time and energy management skills were going to be put to the test. We already had a toddler at home so we knew what to expect in terms of sleep (or lack thereof) and the amount of care newborns need. Multiplying that…
This week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben is sponsored by YCharts: Mention Animal Spirits and receive 20% off your subscription price when you initially sign up for the service. We discuss: Where we were in our careers when the market bottomed 10 years ago Star fund managers Is Bill Gross happy? Persistence in performance may be the…
Bill Gross had a surprisingly candid interview with Robin Wigglesworth of the Financial Times this week. Multiple times he mentioned his desire for fame as a fund manager: “I wanted to be famous because I wanted to be loved . . . so I pursued that obsessively,” he reflects at one point. “Shit, that’s why…
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly 14.5 million people in the U.S. are employed in sales. Considering there are an estimated 153 million people employed in the country that would mean around 9.5% of workers are in sales. While one out of every ten workers is technically in sales according to the BLS…
