One of the troubles with understanding the cryptocurrency boom is that the existing definitions aren’t consistent. We call all of these things “currencies”, but that implies that they are all money which is incorrect. For instance, Filecoin is basically a decentralized version of Dropbox. It isn’t a currency at all. It has an exchange value,… Read More

Eric Lonergan has been cranking out some good stuff on money and language in the last few weeks which got me thinking again about “moneyness” and the network effect of a money system. I wrote a piece on Moneyness back in 2012 that I think describes a realistic operational scale of the utility of money.… Read More

Here’s the first question in the Abnormal Returns blogger wisdom series: Question: Let’s say Warren Buffett re-ups his famous decade-long bet. (He’s not.) He takes the S&P 500. What would you take (and why)? My answer: This is a more interesting bet now. In the 5 years prior to the 2008 bet the US markets… Read More

Here’s a very inaccurate comment by Donald Trump from yesterday: “Now, if you look at the stock market, that’s one element, but then we have many other elements. The country — we took it over, it owed $20 trillion, as you know, the last eight years they borrowed more than it did in the whole history… Read More

Here is a great debate on active vs passive investing between Barry Ritholtz and Nir Kaissar. Go have a read and let me know what you think about it in the forum. But before you do that here’s what I think the future of active management will look like. I started writing about the myth… Read More

Richard Thaler has won the Nobel Prize in economics which is very awesome. Thaler is a cool dude. Not only is he a master academic, but Thaler is a market practitioner as well. He’s among the small group of people in this world who do a lot of theorizing about how the economy works, but… Read More

I love this line from a recent John Bogle interview: “One thing that I strongly urge: Don’t ever, ever, ever if you’re an investor think of being out of the market or in the market,” Bogle is discussing the “fully valued” nature of today’s stock markets and advocating slight changes to one’s allocations. He says… Read More

There’s a company near San Diego called “No Bad Days”. Their logo is a palm tree with the saying and I see it all over cars and stuff. I’m sure you can derive the message – living in San Diego or any place tropical can feel like there are no bad days. That’s total bullshit,… Read More

I’ve spent a lot of time in my career toying with regime change strategies. That is, strategies that operate one way in one regime environment and change in another. So, for instance, if you knew when a recession was going to occur you might downshift your portfolio to something less aggressive. Since recessions are pretty… Read More