Confirmation bias is one of the most powerful human biases. A story from my personal life illustrates why.
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…
My Favorite Investment Writing of 2018
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…
