Music, Art & Engineering
The Target Date Fund, now a staple of 401(k) plans, has a surprisingly colorful origin—emerging from academic theory, shaped by pension consulting, and even brushing up against Star Wars and Kubrick. Behind its quiet ubiquity lies a story of mathematical elegance, financial innovation, and unexpected creativity.
The greater fool is an economic term. For the rest of us to profit, we need a greater fool — someone who will buy high and sell low.
While passive investing offers cost efficiency and broad exposure, its growing dominance may cause illusory distortions in prices and leave markets more vulnerable to abrupt dislocations when the tide turns.
A sector investing strategy is like a well-designed oil tanker navigating volatile seas. Just as an oil tanker is built with separate compartments to keep liquid cargo from shifting and destabilizing the vessel, a portfolio made up of sector ETFs can isolate risk and limit damage from downturns in any one part of the economy.
In the elegant machinery of economics, supply and demand form a perfect circle—each feeding the other in a self-sustaining loop, like the smooth symmetry of a donut. In the new world of AI, the donut isn’t just missing its center—it’s crumbling from the inside out.
Bancor was a supranational currency proposed in 1944 to facilitate international trade by balancing global liquidity and preventing chronic trade deficits and surpluses through an International Clearing Union.
Social media influencers have not only altered the way financial information is consumed, but the markets themselves.
Bond markets are the referee for economic discipline, raising an eyebrow to reckless borrowing and sternly saying, “Behave, or I’ll raise your yields.”
How would Spock invest in the stock market?
The broad range of technologies that we call Artificial Intelligence or AI are going to change the world, but probably not in the ways many speculate. The underlying question is not just the core technology, it’s how it can be applied to deliver practical cost-effective value without egregious energy.
Is the system of money we use today working ? Are there are better alternatives on the horizon? There’s certainly a lot of talk about cryptocurrency. Can we learn anything from the gold standard about crypto’s potential to establish a new type of currency?
Today is Black Friday, the day where most of the citizens of the United States, after participating in a day of gorging on food and disposing most of it into the garbage get into their automobiles and swarm to various department stores to buy stuff they don’t need and justify it because the goods are supposedly deeply discounted, marking the beginning our annual mania of consumption of mass consumer products. In a 2019 study, it was estimated that 80% of these goods will end up in landfills.
Software product development and jazz music share a remarkable similarity in their essence: both are grounded in creativity, exploration, and improvisation.
It’s not until you schedule an intentional “digital detox” that you’ll see how much compulsive behavior punctuates your life and how much willpower it will take to permanently change it.
Perhaps the most important bias in our tone is the cognitive one.