Yes, I’m excited about Michael Lewis’s new book Flash Boys coming out this week but no, I don’t get worked up about high frequency trading anymore. I’m going to tell you a quick story and then you won’t either. Once upon a time in the late 1700’s, there were two types of sonofabitches trading the earliest…

  Cartoon by Mike Smith, Las Vegas Sun

This week’s most amazing cultural read is New York Magazine’s near-encyclopedic look at the city’s history of music – from Tin Pan Alley to the South Bronx, early jazz to punk rock. The below map of NYC ghost landmarks features locations that will be recognizable to music lovers all over the world, despite having long…

Just wanted to revisit something I did on January 5th for a moment, from my year-opening post “You Are Here“. In it, I tried to come up with the most likely scenario for 2014 and I hit upon the 1994 analogy as my top guess: 1. The 1994 – A flattish, low volatility market in 2014 as…

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I’m going to make a very broad point about the nature of investor behavior using a pretty specific example. I hope that you’ll consider the infinite ways in which this concept applies to virtually all areas of investing, asset allocation and business in general. People don’t change. I came across this statistic during the week…

Characters from the game Candy Crush are seen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), in honor of the mobile gaming company King holding its initial public offering at the NYSE on March 25, 2014 in New York, United States. King is the maker of the popular mobile game Candy Crush. Photograph by: Andrew…

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The Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel interviews Nobel laureate Professor Robert Shiller about investing and bubbles this week. I particularly liked this bit, on why bubbles aren’t necessarily “bad” or “good”, but perhaps necessary for capitalism: Q: Are bubbles always a bad thing, or do they have some good effects? A: First of all, it’s a…