The best story I’ve read in a while comes from Highline Magazine. It tells the tale of a couple from a small Northern Michigan town who figured out how to hack the lottery to win millions of dollars. And what they did required no deception, no cheating, and no broken laws. It was perfectly legal and…
The Power of Narrative
Before the early-1900s almost no one in America brushed their teeth. It wasn’t until advertising executive Claude Hopkins came along to pitch Pepsodent that this all changed. Hopkins had previously sold people on the idea of Schlitz beer, Palmolive soap, and Goodyear tires. Now he had a friend who wanted him to help get people to…
Animal Spirits Episode 19: Brothers From Another Mother
On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: How much your job should matter in determining your portfolio. How to clean up a suboptimal portfolio with a mishmash of holdings. The Dustin Hoffman approach to budgeting. The importance of tracking your investment performance. Should you be skeptical of smart beta funds? Investing implications…
Short-Term Outperformance vs. Long-Term Outperformance
Here’s a headline I read this week that seems a bit counterintuitive at first glance: This is a story from Bloomberg about the PruLev Global Macro Fund that was up 52% in 2017, making it the best performing hedge fund in its class. But the return of volatility in the markets saw this fund fall…
The Winners Write the History Books
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…
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…
