A Deep Dive Into Investing Large Amounts of Money Photo: Pixabay So, it happened. You just received a lot of money. Maybe a relative passed away and left you a nest egg. Maybe you sold your business. Maybe you hit the lottery. Regardless of how you got the chunk of change you are currently sitting…
The Cognitive Aristocracy
What Should We Do About the Growing Intellectual Divide? Photo: Pixabay In the year 1900, the United States had a high school graduation rate less than 10% and only half of all children aged 5-19 were enrolled in any form of schooling. Why was school enrollment so low and virtually unchanged since the 1850s? Most…
Even God Couldn’t Beat Dollar-Cost Averaging
The Problem with Buying the Dip Photo: Fabrizio Verrecchia on Unsplash This is the last article you will ever need to read on market timing. It’s a bold claim, but I’m not messing around. So strap in, because the training wheels are off on this one. To start, let’s play a game: Imagine you are dropped somewhere in…
One Big Thing
On the Power of Heuristics and Reducing Complexity Photo: Pixabay Before American Pharoah won the Triple Crown in 2015, no one expected much from the horse. Jeff Seder felt differently. Seder had worked as an analyst at Citigroup before quitting and following his passion to predict the outcome of horse races. But, Seder was different…
Fickle Fortune
On the Ebb and Flow of Luck Photo: Flickr Few people have done more to change the world and have gotten rewarded less for their efforts than Edwin Drake. On August 27, 1859, Drake became the first person in history to successfully drill for oil. Despite his early start, within a few years of his…
Beware the Gatekeeper
On the Most Powerful Cognitive Bias in the World Photo: Pixabay It was the morning of Halloween when I got her text. “What are you doing tonight?” It was Michelle (not her real name), a woman I had been dating off and on for a few months in NYC. “Nothing. What’s up?” I responded. She…
The Price of Greed
How to Think About Wanting More Photo: Pixabay The man who once made cotton the most traded commodity on Earth didn’t make any money off of it. Eli Whitney, the creator of the cotton gin, got a little too greedy. After building a device that could extract cotton while leaving behind the seeds, Whitney went into…
The Rise After the Fall
Post-Traumatic Growth in Life and Markets Photo: Pixabay Janine Shepard was on a training bike ride in the Blue Mountains 100km northwest of Sydney, Australia when her life changed forever. She was riding with her fellow cross-country ski teammates in preparation for the 1988 winter Olympics when a speeding utility truck hit her off her…
Kind or Hostile
The Most Important Decision You Can Make Every Day Photo: Pixabay 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…
Expectation vs. Reality
The Problem Of Planning and What To Do About It Photo: Pixabay It was December 5, 1914 and Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton set out to be the first person to travel by land across Antarctica. Or, at least, that was the plan. Shackleton and his 27 man crew figured they could brave the Wedell Sea and…
