Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
We tend to measure performance by what happens when things are going well. Yet how people, organizations, companies, leaders, and other things do on their best day isn’t all that instructive. To find the truth, we need to look at what …
There are as many investment strategies as there are investment opportunities. Some are good; many are terrible. Here’s the one that I lean on the most when I’m looking for low risk and above average returns. *** Goal: An investment …
James Clear’s book Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones explores an interesting subject, on the compounding nature of the long game. While everyone is looking for big gains—the proverbial …
One of the great challenges we all face in life is distinguishing between two classes of people: people who know and people who sound like they know. It’s called the Batesian Mimicry problem and once you see it, you’ll start to …
Investing money can seem a little rudderless at times. One day you hear that stocks are risky and the next that they’re indispensable. Some days it seems like stocks only go up and sometimes that they only go down. Real estate used to seem …
When legendary investor Warren Buffett was asked what the best money advice he ever received, he replied referencing “by far the best book on investing ever written,” The Intelligent Investor, written in 1949 by Benjamin Graham. Buffett was …
In Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics, Will Bonner writes: …you don’t win by predicting the future; you win by getting the odds right. You can be right about the future and still …
This is a fascinating expert from “How Managers Express Their Creativity” by Herbert Simon that deals with the value of information. Simon compares successful scientific research with successful stock-market investing. …
An excellent parable by Charlie Munger on how one nation came to financial ruin. In the early 1700s, Europeans discovered in the Pacific Ocean a large, unpopulated island with a temperate climate, rich in all nature’s bounty except …
Charlie Munger, the billionaire partner of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, explains why bureaucracy is not shareholder friendly: The great defect of scale, of course, which makes the game interesting—so that the big people don’t …