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Positive-Sum Games
Say you decide to play blackjack with a friend, and you play to a point where one of you wins everything from the other. And say the game starts with $100 from you and another…
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Plan Like A Cockroach
Cockroaches are the ultimate survivors1. They can live without air for an hour, without food and water for months. They can survive the Arctic cold. Ice ages and continent shifts mean nothing to them. It…
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Sidestepping Bubble Stocks
Buying businesses (stocks) is not about winning popularity contests. In fact, the more popular a stock or a category of stocks gets, the less likely its price matches its value. Pay too rich a price…
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Pre-Packaged Portfolios Are Seldom Optimal
Cookie-cutting the investing process seldom works. Take for example someone who is a federal government employee, and we know what that entails…a rock-solid job security with access to an equally rock-solid pension plan. So, assuming…
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Retire To Something
San Luis Obispo has one of the cutest downtowns in California. A must try there if you are ever around is a Turkish pastry shop called Lokum. So, so good. On a stroll to one…
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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,…