Plus My Favorite Books I Read This Year Photo: Pixabay I know the year isn’t over yet, but last year I wrote about my favorite investment writing of 2017 and decided to continue this tradition on Of Dollars And Data. As I mentioned previously, I do not consider other financial bloggers as competition, but as…
When Things Stop Working
On The Persistence of Stock Market Anomalies Photo: Pixabay When the circumstances are right, one of the best evolutionary strategies as an animal is to get larger. Larger animals have longer lifespans and are harder to kill than smaller animals. However, bigger also means more calories and typically fewer offspring, leading to slower population recovery…
What You Can’t Buy
Following Your Beliefs and Why I Came to RWM Photo: Pixabay From a young age, I knew something wasn’t quite right with the world. It all started when I lost my first tooth. I was five years old when I showed my parents my first enameled souvenir. They told me to put it in a…
Four Things Leonardo da Vinci Can Teach Us About Investing
What I Learned From One of History’s Greatest Minds Photo: Pixabay You may know him for the Mona Lisa. You may know him for The Last Supper. However, Leonardo da Vinci was far more than just a painter and an artist. He was an anatomist, a military engineer, a scientist, and the list goes on….
The Old Gods and the New
On Confidence and the God Complex Photo: Pixabay In 2015, Time Magazine named her one of the “100 Most Influential People” in the world, just two months after her 31st birthday. President Obama appointed her to be a U.S. ambassador for global entrepreneurship and Harvard Medical School invited her to its board of fellows. She…
The McRib Effect
Why Understanding Causality is So Difficult Photo: Pixabay It’s Sunday morning. You walk to your mailbox and see a letter from a mysterious stock research firm. The firm claims that their market insights team knows with 100% certainty that a particular stock is going up over the next week. Skeptical, you put the envelope aside…
You Have No Competition
On Your Career Development and How to Think About Competitors Photo: Pixabay I will never forget the moment when I changed how I think about competition. I was watching Barry Ritholtz interview Ken Fisher, the founder and chairman of Fisher Investments, at the opening keynote for the 2018 Evidence-Based Investing Conference (EBI West) in Dana…
A Change in Perspective
Re-Thinking How To Make Investment Decisions Photo: Pixabay The author John Valliant once said that there is only one certainty when it comes to following tiger tracks: If you follow them long enough you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first. This was the reality for Yuri Trush and…
What is Your Financial Tipping Point?
On Understanding Your Financial Limits Photo: Pixabay It was 1949 and Fred Charles Iklé wanted to know why some European cities had been abandoned during World War II while others survived. While traveling through war-torn Germany, Iklé discovered that the city of Hamburg was still inhabited despite losing 3.3% of its population and half of…
Why The Best Predictor of Future Stock Market Returns is Useless
On the Importance of Supply and Demand Photo: Pixabay In one of my favorite animal experiments, researchers wanted to see how pond cichlids would change their mating behavior as the sex ratio (number of males relative to females) was altered in a controlled environment. Since cichlids are known for their monogamy and don’t desert their…
