Constraints are Liberating
Rules free you from entertaining distractions. They keep you in your lane. You always know what to do. You may not like what the rules are telling you, but at least you have the peace of mind of knowing what you have to do to succeed. Given the abundance and unhealthy amount of information flying […]
Collect. Don’t Hoard.
Media and technology afford us the ability to gather ideas and act on them very cheaply these days. We’re constantly bombarded with people selling their ideas. Whether it’s CNBC, Bloomberg, Barrons, WSJ, Twitter accounts, Motley Fool, our friends or co-workers, we have no shortage of stocks and investing ideas to consider. Get bored with one […]
The Perfect Entry
There’s a prevailing opinion out there that if you don’t get in at the perfect time then the opportunity is gone. Don’t bother with this investment anymore because what’s even the point, right? Better to find another one where the perfect entry still exists. “I could’ve owned Apple or Google but I missed it.” You […]
Look to the Markets for Clarity
It’s confusing out there these days. There’s so much information about how the economy is doing, what inflation will do, whether jobs are coming back and the like. Trying to piece all if this (often dated) information together about what the markets will do in the future seems like a surefire way to misread the […]
Connoisseur Investors
As a lover of good wine, I understand the attraction towards the most prestigious brands. Petrus, Romanée-Conti, Château Margaux, Sassicaia, Opus One, etc. Not only do these producers have a history of making great wine, they provide the added benefit of inflating your social status when busting one out at a party. It shows you […]
Why Investors Cannot Outperform Benchmarks
I wrote this five years ago on Medium, but I have some new comments below. https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/why-investors-cannot-outperform-simple-benchmarks-d6a587a54967 So many people are focused on fees, liquidity and strategy transparency. Well, everyone can access their beloved index funds at zero fees with daily liquidity and easily find how the indexes, such as the S&P 500, are constructed. Yet the […]
Know Your Patients
Today, it’s all about scaling — raising a lot of money, managing a lot of money, growing the business every quarter and increasing the bottom line. It’s not conducive to putting the customer, investor or patient first. It’s all about you, the business. Hey, I’m not against managing a profitable business, but I am against […]
Reliable is Cool
We all love more features, more customization, more of the bells and whistles. We get bored with tried-and-true. We crave the new-and-improved even if it means taking on more risk. Opening the present becomes more important than the present itself. The journey away from battle-tested and reliable methods often leads to failure. The basics are […]
Too Many Metrics
I don’t have performance-standards for my trading. No goals for annualized growth figures or anything like that. That’s a recipe for stress and failure. I simply start with “how much am I willing to lose?”. All I can control is how much I risk on each trade. Based on historical research and trading in real […]
Excess Gets Washed Away
Forest fires clear the way for new growth. Storms remove stale air out of a region. Predators cull the weak, which helps control overpopulation. Bear markets purge greedy speculators and those that gather an abundance of debt. Nature has its way of regulating itself. Same goes for the markets. Greedy speculators become blinded to risk. […]