I try to share good posts via Twitter. A bunch of people were writing solid stuff this week: A Little Knowledge is Dangerous – Nick Maggiulli – Surprising stat about survival rates for people lost in the wild. Kids six and under have a surprisingly high survival rate while…
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Moar Bitcoin!
After my last post about Bitcoin, I got a lot of, “So… Bitcoin?” No one has a concrete opinion on this thing except the evangelists, but everyone wants to discuss it. Skeptics seem more concerned about staying in their lane than dragging down crypto – they don’t understand it, they…
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I Changed My Mind On Bitcoin
I changed my mind on Bitcoin a few weeks ago. A bunch of smart people had made public comments on it, generating buzz. I was going to write up a short summary for our investment team with pros and cons, ultimately concluding that Bitcoin was garbage. But then I did…
Investing
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Tone Deaf on ETFs
A couple of major announcements in the Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) world last week: State Street announced that they slashed the expense ratios on a ton of their ETFs and TD Ameritrade added a ton of ETFs to their ‘no-commission’ platform. At first glance, this is great news. Cheaper beta…
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Update on Everyone’s Favorite $37 Billion Hedge Fund
It’s Harvard. The $37 billion hedge fund is Harvard. More specifically, I’m referencing Harvard’s endowment. When Harvard announced yet another management change last year, I was skeptical. It seemed to me that Jane Mendillo inherited a mess created by an intellectual mercenary (who left his next employer under undesirable circumstances…
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H4ck3d
H4ck3d The big news this morning is the Equifax hack. One of the handful of companies that compresses your financial life down into a single number got hacked, possibly exposing credit card numbers, social security numbers, names, and birth dates to unsavory characters. While credit card issuers can just issue…
Weekend Reads
Some fun reads and shameless self-promotion I take the L on high yield A discussion of taxing bitcoin. Isn’t avoiding tax part of the point of an anonymous currency? Bill Nye may have had his face ripped off by Hollywood accounting Shocker: A third of high-end real estate deals may…
Due Diligence
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Wrongness and a Strange Animal
Investing is such a strange animal. You can be wrong and still make money. You can be right and still lose money. I have been wrong on high yield bonds for the last couple of years. I didn’t like the energy component of the space. Oil prices were falling due…
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For William’s First Day of Second Grade
Today’s post is a departure from the norm of investment news and snark. I’m going to share a bit about my son, William, and ask you to spend a minute of your day to think about his cause. William was born in 2010 with Autosomal Recessive Polycystic Kidney Disease, or…
Due Diligence
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No, the Secret Sauce
“I thought you guys had some sort of insider’s edge and that’s how you get returns for your clients’ investments…?” My friend was grilling up burgers and dogs for his kid’s birthday party while picking my brain about investing. He was surprised to find out how vanilla our investment philosophy…