The Great Depression is endlessly fascinating to me because I can’t imagine something like that happening in modern times in the U.S. The Great Recession was the worst financial crisis we’ve seen since the 1930s but it was child’s play compared to that period. The Great Recession saw GDP decline 5.1% with the unemployment rate…
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Animal Spirits Episode 62: The Market Swoon
This week’s Animal Spirits with Michael & Ben is sponsored by YCharts: Mention Animal Spirits and receive 20% off your subscription price when you sign up. We discuss: Steve Mnuchin’s bizarre statement on the banks. Big up and down days in the market. What’s the biggest cause of the market’s downturn? Are algos really to blame…
The Amazons of the Fund World
The Wall Street Journal had a headline that got a bunch of finance people in a tizzy yesterday: What?! The father of index funds is worried about…index funds?! People need to settle down and read the actual article. But before I get to this story let’s look at a cool graph about Amazon Prime you can…
How the American Consumer Got Addicted to Choice
In 1886 a box of watches was accidentally sent to a jewelry dealer who didn’t order them. Instead of sending them back he sold them for a profit which eventually led him to start a watch distribution company. Seven years later he found a partner who helped him use catalogs to sell watches by the…
Under Pressure
It’s estimated 44% of eligible voters didn’t fill out a ballot for the 2016 elections. That amount of people vastly outnumbered those who voted for Trump, Clinton or any of the third party candidates. Here’s the data courtesy of The Big Picture: Trump and Clinton were both in the 60 million range while the number of…
Undervalued Financial Advice
There’s a lot of overvalued financial advice out there these days. Don’t drink lattes or you’ll never be able to save for retirement. You should make your own toothpaste to save more money. Just follow my simple system to get the highest interest rate on your savings account. There’s nothing wrong with cutting back, being…
Avoiding a Single Point of Financial Failure
In 1995, Pixar was on a rocket ship growth trajectory. Toy Story came out in November of that year to rave reviews and made more money than almost anyone thought was imaginable. It was the first full-length animated film done entirely using CGI and ended up grossing over $360 million worldwide. The team at Pixar…
The Case For Reading Fiction
I saw a meme floating around social media recently that read: LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO READ FICTION I disagree. I probably read more non-fiction than fiction but here are a few reasons why I like to balance things out with a little of each: Storytelling is important. Sociologist Murray Davis wrote a research paper in the…
“The market is rolling simply because it’s rolling”
“This market is rolling simply because it’s rolling.” I love learning about market history but often times you’re reading a historical account which was pieced together many years after the fact. I like reading what people were thinking and feeling at the time to get a sense of how investors handled their business in the…
The Original Flash Crash (or Why Liquidity Fears Are Nothing New)
In his latest memo, Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks opined about ETFs and their liquidity profile: If you withdraw from a mutual fund, you’ll get the price at which the underlying stocks or bonds closed that day, the net asset value or NAV. But the price you get when you sell an ETF — like any security on…
