If your interests are niche enough, it feels like the world’s population is, at most, a couple hundred people. Enough that you don’t personally know everyone, but not so many that you’re more than two degrees of separation away. This thought occurred to me a few months
The Latest It’s been a busy week. The latest posts: * In Basis Risk, Alpha Factories, and Being too Clever for your own Good, I take a look at the perks and perils of hedge funds that lever up to run lots of ostensibly-uncorrelated strategies. It usually works, but everyone
Readers, I appreciate you all, but you are so negative. I’ve published 64 pieces on Medium, but 75% of my lifetime pageviews come from just three: one about why US residential real estate is broken, one about the challenges of the mealkit industry, and one about how California has
You can’t reduce all economic decisions to a series of financial bets, but it’s a good way to clarify things. Sometimes. Unfortunately, in the case of COBOL, a sufficiently thoughtful analysis points in two equal and opposite directions: we either need to pay people to learn it or
Everyone knows you can justify writing about any trend as long as you have three examples. So I was absolutely thrilled to see this tweet: The time has come. Join me as I overthink elevators. Elevators are a big deal because interruptions are a big deal. There is almost no
The most committed atheists I know are people who grew up religious. The most devout people I know went through a Strong Atheism phase. There are various theories here, most of which are folk psychology — disgust, attention-seeking, daddy issues, etc. — but the best one I’ve heard (from an evangelical
In Peak California, I argued that California was no longer the best place in the world for startups, but that the state’s economic ecosystem and tax ecosystem rely on a steady flow of new companies. I got some feedback. In this post, I’ll address some of the questions
Nassim Taleb has worked hard to popularize the concept of “skin in the game,” both through his books (like, well, Skin in the Game), and by calling people who don’t have sufficient skin in the game imbeciles on Twitter. The idea is straightforward: if someone makes a prediction, it
“How many secrets are there in the world? Recall that, reframed in a business context, the key question is: what great company is no one starting? If there are many possible answers, it means that there are many great companies that could be created. If there are no good answers,
The world economy has grown by about 19x since 1950. Total trade has grown by around 60x. This means the world economy has gotten much more globalized since the middle of the last century.The Box is the story of how. The short version is that shipping used to be
People talk about stocks a lot. Individual equities, the market as a whole, etc. But there’s wide disagreement on exactly what we mean. This is not an accident. If we all agreed on the fundamentals, there would be less to talk about: one of the persistent aberrations academics struggle
Does Alan Greenspan still matter? Reassessing his legacy feels like the Cadaver Synod: we’ll dig up a bunch of FOMC transcripts from the early 2000s and complain that the Fed was completely unaware of what is obvious only in hindsight. Rehabilitating Greenspan is equally pointless, though: he was the