Last week the New York Times had a story about how everyone’s favorite punching bags, the millennials, aren’t using credit cards nearly as much as previous generations: Data from the Federal Reserve indicates that the percentage of Americans under 35 who hold credit card debt has fallen to its lowest level since 1989, when the…

Thinking process over outcomes is one of those simple, yet difficult pieces of advice that is useful in many areas of your life. It’s difficult because we’re so obsessed keeping score and thinking in binary right or wrong terms. Since luck and randomness play such a large role in a complex world it’s more important…

It seems that every investor these days considers themselves to be a contrarian, so much so that the term doesn’t carry as much weight as it once used to. I almost hate to even define myself as a contrarian anymore. I don’t think being a contrarian is as much about going against the crowd as…

Until I read the book Shadow Divers: The True Story of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II I didn’t really know much about scuba diving. Sure, I tried it once in Mexico, but that was maybe 25-30 feet of water. The book tells an amazing story…

One of biggest lessons I learned early on in my career was the importance of asking questions. It took me a while, but I think being inquisitive is a great trait to have because the process of learning doesn’t have an end date. There is always more to learn. But I think you also have…

Spencer Jakab has a great new book out called Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tilt the Odds in Your Favor.  Jakab is currently a columnist at the Wall Street Journal, but also spent part of his career as a sell side research analyst. The fact that he is…

The first investment book I ever read was Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. This is one of a handful of books you hear mentioned over and over again when you ask investors to name the best investing books of all-time. The edition I read was annotated by Jason Zweig, which was very helpful because he was able…

One of the best parts about the Internet is that now nearly everyone has a platform to share their opinions. One of the worst parts about the Internet is that now nearly everyone has a platform to share their opinions. There has never been a better time to be an individual investor and the abundance of…

My colleague Barry Ritholtz recently sat down to talk with Burton Malkiel — of A Random Walk Down Wall Street fame — on his Masters in Business podcast. Right off the bat Malkiel did some myth-busting on the Efficient Market Hypothesis: What efficient markets are associated with which is wrong is that efficient markets mean that…

What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars is easily one of the most underrated investment books I’ve come across. The book was actually first published in the early 1990s but re-released a few years ago. It tells the story of Jim Paul, a former futures trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange who made a sizeable…