Category: Non-Fiction
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What’s the Point, Powell?
Thoughts of a Liberal Arts Graduate on the Fed, interest rates, inflation, demographics, and more The entire point of low interest rates was to shift consumers up the risk ladder. Lower potential returns in lower risk baskets purposefully pushed investors toward riskier options; pushed them to take more risk, for the same reward. The Fed…
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Market Performance and a Little Optimism
This one goes off the rails a bit toward the end. If you get bogged down, I’d skip to the conclusion. Thanks for reading. Those who are waiting, stashing their dry-powder (cash) in savings accounts, may have missed one of the greatest opportunities to purchase equities since 2009. Let’s have a look at how select…
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To drill or not to drill?
The Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) is the latest hot spot of conflict between environmentalists and capitalists. The Trump Administration recently announced allowance of drilling in this massive area of Northern AK, a move that is likely to be tied up in litigation for some time. Proponents argue the move will bring both jobs and…
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Why Capitalism Might Not be the Future
There’s a famous story of a Russian diplomat in the Cold War era who visited an American city. In Russia, bread lines were a daily occurrence. People waiting in line (not working and producing) for bread and food stuffs. When the diplomat visited the American city and saw there was bread on every shelf, he…
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Is Active Management Dead?
I’d like to attempt to disavow a common misconception with trading in equity markets. Before you read, answer the following question: What’s more important to trading: seeking gains or avoiding losses? In popular media, the best traders are those that can pick the winners better than the rest. Hot take, the best traders are those…
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Most Dangerous Groups to Financial Stability
Today’s market is frothy, no doubt about it. Everything’s near all time highs, even as central banks are set to cut rates again. There’s over 16 trillion dollars in negative yielding debt outstanding in global bond markets. Global growth and inflation have been tepid. Corporate debt issuance in the US is booming with cheap credit…
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Power of Humanity: How Ideas Evolve
If you want to launch a revolution, don’t ask yourself how many people support my idea. Instead ask yourself how many of my supporters are capable of effective collaboration. – Yurval Noah Harai, Homo Deus Cooperation History as our teacher, societies that form social bonds and have learned to cooperate more efficiently than others have been…
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The Optimization Problem
What changes do you want to see in the world and what are you doing to achieve them? Control what you can, to see the change you want to see. The following is an introduction to optimization and an exercise in re-framing how we each see our world. I challenge you to be intentional with…
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Global Investment Themes
Main themes as I saw them from the 2019 CFA Annual Conference in London: Growing Inequality Sustainable Investment and Climate Change Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Big Data The first of these themes can be tied to the remaining three. Inequality There is a tangible dispersion between the haves and have-nots of the world, in…
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The Search for ET
If the galaxy is so large, why haven’t we heard from other intelligent life? With new exoplanets being discovered seemingly daily (4065 so far), why haven’t we heard from ET? This is the so-called Fermi Paradox. Let’s take a step back and consider the time scale on which the galaxy operates. The big bang was…
fungible thoughts 
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