My Favorite Posts This Week Posted on November 17, 2017November 16, 2017 By Matt 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… Read more
News Moar Bitcoin! Posted on November 16, 2017 By Matt 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… Read more
News I Changed My Mind On Bitcoin Posted on November 8, 2017 By Matt 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… Read more
Investing Tone Deaf on ETFs Posted on October 23, 2017 By Matt 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… Read more
News Update on Everyone’s Favorite $37 Billion Hedge Fund Posted on October 10, 2017 By Matt 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… Read more
News H4ck3d Posted on September 8, 2017 By Matt 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… Read more
Weekend Reads Posted on August 26, 2017August 25, 2017 By Matt 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… Read more
Due Diligence Wrongness and a Strange Animal Posted on August 25, 2017 By Matt 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… Read more
News For William’s First Day of Second Grade Posted on August 22, 2017 By Matt 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… Read more
Due Diligence No, the Secret Sauce Posted on August 15, 2017 By Matt “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… Read more