I remember reading The Accidental Billionaires just after it came out in 2009 or so and being blown away by the back story of how Facebook was founded (This is the book the movie Social Network was based on). After reading about the drama surrounding the founding of the company in a Harvard dorm room I would…

Earlier this week I wrote (again) about the importance of understanding financial market history. This prompted a few people to ask for some of my favorite books on the topic. Here goes: Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation If I had to pick just one book to read on the topic, this would…

I don’t have any groundbreaking insights on the cryptocurrency phenomenon. Some people think it’s going to revolutionize payments and transactions while others assume it’s the no different than the Dutch Tulip Bubble. I’ve done a fair amount of reading on the topic and have concluded that it falls into my too hard pile. But it…

Earlier this week I wrote about the attributes successful investors share but I forgot one — a deep understanding of financial market history. This history proves to be more of a guide to human psychology than a road map for beating the market. No two market environments are ever exactly the same but fear, greed,…

“Man, money aint’t got no owners, only spenders.” – Omar Little Successful investors have some combination of the following: Analytical firepower Math skills The correct temperament A deep understanding of human psychology The right amount of self-doubt A high level of emotional intelligence The ability to think in terms of probabilities The discipline to follow…

In a recent piece, I discussed why it’s not that out of the ordinary for a handful of stocks to account for a large portion of the stock market’s gains. This is just the nature of the beast with the stock market. There are very few big winners and lots of big losers over the long haul….

Every year it seems investors worry that far too few stocks are carrying the market higher. The problem is most people never take the next step to see how often this actually happens. This is a piece I wrote for Bloomberg myth-busting the idea that a few stocks up big are a problem for the stock…

The mid-to-late 1990s in Major League Baseball saw a huge uptick in home runs as steroid use became rampant. Records were being shattered every year as everyone ignored how huge these guys were all getting during a time when there was basically no drug testing. The steroids era in baseball coincided with something of a…

The current market environment is a tough one to handicap. On the one hand, there aren’t any flashing warning signs in terms of euphoria from investors. On the other hand, the “most hated bull market of all-time” continues to charge higher, causing valuations and investor allocations to stocks to go far above their long-term averages. There seems…

A friend recently asked for some advice about his investment portfolio. He told me he’s considering a strategy that would involve dollar cost averaging into leveraged ETFs such as the ProShares Ultra S&P 500 3x Leveraged ETF (UPRO). He told me that he understands the increased volatility, the potential for greater drawdowns and possible decay from…