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How Risky Are Individual Stocks?
Google was busy relishing its unrelenting grip on the search business and along comes ChatGPT, a supposed Google-killer that helped lop several hundred billion dollars off its market value. Whether ChatGPT does any lasting damage…
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Demystifying Investment Returns
We’ll start with the simplest of all possible investments and that is buying Treasury bonds. When we buy a bond, we become a lender. And with Treasury bonds, we become a lender to the U.S.…
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An Obvious Secret To Wealth
The truth about the Warren Buffett class of wealth is that if somehow a Buffett were to be stripped of all his wealth, his life wouldn’t change. The Gates and the Zuckerbergs of the world fall into the same camp. They do indeed…
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Takeaways From Investment Scams
Bernard Madoff ran a successful wealth management business for several decades. He was the chairperson of the Nasdaq stock exchange. People looked up to him until it was discovered that he was in fact running a…
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Investing Is Hard
Warren Buffett says that investing is simple but not easy. Let us reconcile these two data points from two different news sources at the onset of COVID. The US economy lost 20.5 million jobs in April,…
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Recency Bias
Americans afraid of flying overwhelmingly took to the nation’s highways in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. But flying as we know is much, much safer than driving can ever be. Our odds…
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Let Prognosticators Pontificate
Joseph Granville was in the business of prognostication. He was a stock market maven. He knew precisely what to buy and when to buy. He moved markets. And he let it all know in a newsletter…
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Quit Playing The Game You’ve Already Won
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple. We all know that. What many don’t know is that there was a third co-founder. His name was Ronald Wayne. The reason we don’t hear much about him is because he quit…
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A Tale of Two Speculators
Edwin Lefèvre in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, a 1923 pseudo-fictional novel, chronicles the life of Jesse Livermore, a real person who was a stock trader par excellence of the time. He made and lost fortunes many times…
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Gold Is Not An Investment
Before the Great Depression of 1929, the United States experienced a mini, almost forgotten depression towards the tail-end of World War 1 (1920-1921). That mini depression was partly caused by the government slashing its expenses…