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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 at the tail-end of World War 1 (1920-1921). That mini depression was partly caused by the government slashing its expenses…
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The Right Way To Insure Your Life
Life is fragile; we all know that. But we get so busy with our day-to-day lives that we procrastinate and forget to do the most fundamental thing we should do to protect our families. And…
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Currency Movements Don’t Matter
Stock market composition changes by the country. The United States is tech heavy. Canada is banks heavy. Australia is commodities heavy. Emerging markets were commodities heavy a few years back. They turned tech heavy with…
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Don’t Fall For The Growth Trap
As the rest of the world lay in ruins, the United States was pretty much the only country left with production capacity intact post-World War 2. And with a lot of rebuilding that was to…
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Hardwired To Be Screwed
Gary Smith in his book, Standard Deviations talks about the evolution of peppered moths, usually found in nature as light-colored creatures. But that was not always the case. A trickle of dark-colored moths started appearing in 1848 England…
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Capital Preservation And Growth Doesn’t Exist
Stocks are volatile. And a big reason they’ll remain volatile is because of where a stock’s value comes from. The value of a stock today is the sum of all the cash flows (dividends) a…