Wall Street’s Top Trader Invites Me to His Penthouse
PS: Not exactly my way of seeing the world but some interesting pints of overlap.
Crypto Was Always Smoke and Mirrors
The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby. James Block, who runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty…
Greed: What Is It Good for?
What is greed good for? Greed is ubiquitous, suggesting that it must have some benefits, but it is also often condemned. In a representative sample of the Dutch population (N = 2,367, 51.3% female, Mage = 54.06, SD = 17.90), we examined two questions. First, inspired by Eriksson et al., we studied whether greedy people generate more personal and household…
The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgement, by Charlie Munger
I have long been very interested in standard thinking errors. However, I was educated in an era wherein the contributions of non-patient-treating psychology to an understanding of misjudgment met little approval from members of the mainstream elite. Instead, interest in psychology was pretty well confined to a group of professors who talked and published mostly…
How Will Investors Behave in 2023?
Although many people do it, making forecasts about how financial markets will fare in 2023 is an entirely pointless endeavour. What we can predict with some confidence, however, is how investors will behave – that doesn’t change much. So, what will we all be doing in 2023? More here – Behavioural Investment
The Myth of the Secret Genius
If he’s super rich, he must be a super genius. That conclusion is a cognitive mistake many continue to make when they encounter a seemingly incongruous state of affairs, such as Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, behaving like an irrational idiot. And yet, behave like an idiot he does, day after day, a public jester who…
Monty Hall and “the Leibniz Illusion”
Throughout the history of mathematics, quite a few mathematical problems have achieved celebrity status outside the circle of mathematicians. Famous problems such as squaring the circle or proving Fermat’s last theorem have intrigued thousands of people over the centuries. But almost no mathematical problem has been as fiercely and widely debated as the Monty Hall…
David Walsh: 8 Lessons on Punting and Life From The Billion-Dollar Bettor
David Walsh and Zeljko Ranogajec rose from humble Hobart university students to become two of the most successful professional gamblers in history. Their betting syndicate turns over literally billions of dollars each year and is recognised as one of the world’s biggest gambling operations. Both David Walsh and Zeljko Ranogajec are private individuals who rarely…
Investment Bubbles and Frauds Have a Lot in Common
Expensive investor mistakes come in two forms. We can either lose money slowly or quickly. Slow losses are small and compound over time – largely unnoticed – growing into a major cost; these can be through high fees or persistent performance chasing. Rapid losses are far more dramatic and are often a result of us…
