In yesterdays video I talked briefly about eliminating the noise that seems to be so predominant today. Part of this noise tries to generate a cohesive narrative that mixes politics, the economy and the market and to impose a relationship where there is probably none. Governments come and go economies travel in fits and spurts…
Its big, loud, German and stupid…….what more do you need?
I was recently listening to the 100th episode of the Michael Kitces podcast with Joe Duran to learn about how Duran used data analytics to help build and scale a $24 billion wealth management firm. However, it wasn’t the machine learning or the data-driven decision making that stuck with me the most. It was something Duran said at the end of…
When, at the age of 50, John Fenn joined the faculty at Yale, he was old by academic standards. But then again, he was an inveterate late starter. He published his first research paper at 32, a decade after leaving graduate school. He was 35 when he got his first academic appointment, at Princeton, where he started working…
…..And noting your gratitude seems to pay off: There’s a growing body of research on the benefits of gratitude. Studies have found that giving thanks and counting blessings can help people sleep better, lower stress and improve interpersonal relationships. Earlier this year, a study found that keeping a gratitude journal decreased materialism and bolstered generosity among adolescents. In another study from August, high school…
1 million seconds is abut 11 days. 1 billion seconds is about 31.5 years. I cannot remember where I heard the example above but it is a wonderful example of peoples inability to understand scale particularly when it involves orders of magnitude change. In part it relates to why people cannot understand why a loss…
The DSM-5 says that roughly 15% of people meet the criteria for a personality disorder. And most of them are never diagnosed. Now you’re not a psychiatrist and neither am I, so we shouldn’t run around diagnosing people… But we can learn enough to recognize if someone is a “high-conflict person”, reasonably give a diagnosis of “no good for…
One of the key issues facing new traders is being under capitalised. A small trading portfolio can be detrimental for two reasons. One, brokerage fees will churn your account. Two, you are limited in the way you can position size. So in other words a small capital base puts you at a disadvantage when you…
As the year draws to a close on a down note my inbox is full of wonderful end of the year offers promising me that they can save me from the next crash, which is very kind of them. These offers are a mix of divine prediction and the packaging and selling of common tools…
I came across this chart the other day and the message it was trying to convey intrigued me. The chart is from this Vanguard update. I am intrigued because the chart is saying that the market rewards those who hold for the long term – in essence it is talking about a buy and hold…
Out-running ‘bad’ diets: beyond weight loss there is clear evidence of the benefits of physical activity Of course there is evidence of the benefits of physical activity but your chances of out running a bad diet are practically zero because to do so you would need to exercise at this intensity for much longer than this…
One of the things that is disappointing about technical analysis is its constant default towards superstition and nonsense. This silliness drags the entire profession down and when technicians take umbrage at the way they are viewed they only have themselves to blame. A reader asked whether Charles Nenner, self-described as “the talk of Wall Street since…
