Sometimes when you look at a group of prices what you see is not necessarily what you get as I found out when I had a quick look at base metal prices. What triggered this little foray into a segment of the market I dont really deal in was the piece below that appeared on…
Dry heaves racked Dan Stoddard’s body as he bent his 6-foot-8, 325-plus-pound frame awkwardly over a toilet, shaking as he vomited up the Gatorade and other fluids he had consumed in an attempt to stave off dehydration. The 39-year-old hadn’t slept well in days, and even when he did manage some shut-eye, it was only…
“Mistakes are the portals of discovery” wrote the author James Joyce. I recently spoke with a young analyst in Private Equity who wanted to take a pragmatic look into regrets with one qualifier – “not the deathbed kind.” He wondered aloud, what were some common regrets of people ten or twenty years older? And did they…
Growing up, did you know you were wealthy? At least when I was young, my parents weren’t really showy people. The money didn’t really change them until later. Actually, they were really proud of being humble people — an oxymoron, I know. They wanted to raise us with the sense that we weren’t any better…
If ever there were a parable about saving money and not splurging your bonus on the first car or watch that crosses your path, the sorry tale ofJPMorgan’s employee benefit trust (EBT) would seem to be it. Well over a decade since bonuses were allocated, some JPMorgan recipients are being asked to pay money back – to…
Nearly everything people think is true about living their best life is wrong A few years ago, when I began to focus more on my writing career, my mom, a former writer herself, gave me a book titled Passion: Every Day. It was filled with inspiring quotes like “I dare you, while there is still time, to…
Thanks to remarkable new technologies and the widespread use of social media, we are more “connected” than ever before. Yet as a nation, we are also more lonely. In fact, a recent study found that a staggering 47 percent of Americans often feel alone, left out and lacking meaningful connection with others. This is true for all…
My guest this week is with Annie Duke, and the topic of our discussion is how to improve decision making. We break decisions down into their component parts: values, beliefs, decisions, randomness, and outcomes. After diving into each, we discuss how to make better decisions, how to work in group settings, and how to harness…
You’re a Russian criminal with millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains but one big problem: Transferring slugs of money or carrying suitcases of cash will raise eyebrows. You need to “launder” the dough — make the dirty money appear to be the proceeds of legitimate enterprise. Then it can be spent anywhere in the world…
Human behaviors are often tied to one another. For example, consider the case of a woman named Jennifer Dukes Lee. For two and a half decades during her adult life, starting when she left for college and extending into her 40s, Lee never made her bed except for when her mother or guests dropped by…
Do you ever feel like your mind is one big, infinitely scrolling, incredibly cluttered to-do list? And are you always struggling to keep it updated, remember what’s on it, readjust its priorities, and delete what no longer serves you? Brooklyn-based product designer Ryder Carroll suggests his solution to this problem: keeping a journal. “We have to externalize…
Yet there is never a shortage of them of offering their opinion. Surely at some stage you would just give up and admit you were crap. President Trump likes to brag about the supposedly booming economy. So do other Republican politicians. Some journalists have gotten into the habit too, exaggerating the strength of the economic…
I once worked for someone who offered me the opportunity to work on a new project nearly every day. These projects were not the quick ones, where you spend 15 minutes and crank out a solution. They were crap work. And there were strings: my boss wanted to be informed about everything, and there was…
