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…
Talking Inflation & Interest Rates on What’d You Miss
This week I was on What’d You Miss talking with Joe, Julia, and Lisa this about how inflation and rising interest rates tend to impact stock market performance: Here’s the full piece for some more data behind these thoughts: Inflation is a Bigger Danger to Stocks Than Rising Rates There’s not always a perfect…
The Curse of Intelligence
Before I really knew anything about human behavior, incentives, and how the markets really work, I was always blown away by the sheer amount of intelligence I would come across in the investment world. Most of the people I’ve interacted with throughout my career are highly educated at some of the best colleges and universities…
Animal Spirits Episode 17: Phony Happiness
On this week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben we discuss: How hard it is to predict what’s going to transpire over the short-term in the markets. The pros & cons of private equity. The phony happiness provided by private equity reporting. What would a permanent portfolio look like to us? Why picking an asset…
Inequality in the Stock Market
The stock market is one of the biggest equalizers in terms of leveling the playing field from a wealth perspective because it allows anyone with some money to easily invest in corporations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of stock market wealth is concentrated in the hands of the rich. In this piece I wrote for Bloomberg…
The Biggest Thing I Got From an MBA
I didn’t really have a good reason to get my MBA. I already had the CFA designation and going to business school wasn’t going to change the trajectory of my career all that much…or so I thought. Business school didn’t teach me to be any better at running a business or leadership or financial theory…
Decision Regret
One of the hardest parts of the decision-making process in any endeavor stems from the fact that there are no counterfactuals. You can’t simply run a simulation and create a decision tree to show how different decisions and variables would affect the outcomes of each and every big decision you make. This leads to what…
