Category Archives: General Investing

Warren Buffett says that investing is simple but not easy. Let us reconcile these two data points from two different news sources at the onset of COVID. The US economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday — by far the most sudden and largest decline since the government began tracking theContinue reading “Investing Is Hard”

Americans afraid of flying overwhelmingly took to the nation’s highways in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. But flying as we know is much, much safer than driving can ever be. Our odds of getting killed in a plane crash – one in a million. Our chances of dying in a carContinue reading “Recency Bias”

Joseph Granville was in the business of prognostication. He was a stock market maven. He knew precisely what to buy and when to buy. He moved markets. And he let it all know in a newsletter he published called the Granville Market Letter. In that, he gave specific instructions on whether it was time to buyContinue reading “Let Prognosticators Pontificate”

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple. We all know that. What many don’t know is that there was a third co-founder. His name was Ronald Wayne. The reason we don’t hear much about him is because he quit Apple just two weeks after the company was formed. He then sold his 10 percent stake in the company forContinue reading “Quit Playing The Game You’ve Already Won”

Edwin Lefèvre in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, a 1923 pseudo-fictional novel, chronicles the life of Jesse Livermore, a real person who was a stock trader par excellence of the time. He made and lost fortunes many times over but ultimately and tragically ended up taking his own life. Jesse Livermore went from being one of theContinue reading “A Tale of Two Speculators”

Before the Great Depression of 1929, the United States experienced a mini, almost forgotten depression towards the tail-end of World War 1 (1920-1921). That mini depression was partly caused by the government slashing its expenses to balance its budget considering the wartime debt the country took on. That plus rapidly rising prices brought upon byContinue reading “Gold Is Not An Investment”

Life is fragile; we all know that. But we get so busy with our day-to-day living that we procrastinate and forget to do the most fundamental thing we should do to protect our families. And that is to insure our lives. It’ll cost some money, but it is the best money you’ll ever spend. AndContinue reading “The Right Way To Insure Your Life”

Stock market composition changes by the country. United States is tech heavy. Canada is banks heavy. Australia is commodities heavy. Emerging markets were commodities heavy a few years back. They turned tech heavy with the rise of the likes of Alibaba and Tencent. That can change and it will change. That is the nature ofContinue reading “Currency Movements Don’t Matter”

As the rest of the world lay in ruins, the United States was pretty much the only country left with production capacity intact post-World War 2. And with a lot of rebuilding that was to follow meant that the nation’s factories were running overtime to meet the inexhaustible demand. Plus, with exploding domestic consumption asContinue reading “Don’t Fall For The Growth Trap”

Gary Smith in his book, Standard Deviations talks about the evolution of peppered moths, usually found in nature as light-colored creatures. But that was not always the case. A trickle of dark-colored moths started appearing in 1848 England but by 1895, ninety-eight percent of the peppered moths found there were dark-colored. But by the 1950s, the pendulum startedContinue reading “Hardwired To Be Screwed”