subject
Investing
How markets, portfolios, and risk actually behave. Educational rather than advisory: the lessons describe what is, not what to do.
13 lessons in investing
Active and Passive Management: The Long-Running Debate
In 2007, Warren Buffett offered a wager: over the next ten years, a plain S&P 500 index fund would beat any basket of hedge funds a professional could assemble, after fees.
4 min · comparison
How Compound Interest Works Over Long Horizons
Imagine two siblings, both earning the same modest salary. One begins setting aside a fixed sum each year at age twenty-five and stops at thirty-five. The other waits until thirty-five and contributes…
4 min · foundation
How Insurance Pools Risk
Imagine a thousand families on a block. Every year, by bad luck, about three of those houses catch fire. Nobody knows which three. If your house is one of them, the loss is ruinous — maybe half a mill…
3 min · deepening
Saving and Investing: Two Different Things Your Money Can Do
Imagine you have eighty dollars in a shoebox under your bed. The money is safe in the ordinary sense — no one is going to steal it tonight — but it is also doing nothing. A year from now, you will sti…
3 min · comparison
What a Stock Actually Represents
When most people picture a stock, they picture a flickering price on a screen.
3 min · foundation
What an Index Fund Tracks and Why It's Cheap
Imagine a librarian whose only job is to keep the shelves arranged in exactly the same order as a master catalog printed somewhere else.
4 min · deepening
What Happens When You Put Money in a Savings Account
Picture walking into a bank with two crisp twenty-dollar bills and handing them to a teller.
3 min · foundation
What Inflation Actually Is
In 1970, a movie ticket in the United States cost about a dollar and a half.
3 min · foundation
Why Bond Prices Move Opposite to Interest Rates
Imagine you bought a bond last month for $1,000. It promises to pay you $40 every year for ten years and then return your $1,000 at the end. A week later, your neighbor walks into the same brokerage a…
4 min · foundation
Why Markets Are Hard to Beat: The Efficient Markets Hypothesis
Imagine a hundred-dollar bill lying on a busy sidewalk. An economist walks past without bending down. Asked why, she answers: if it were really there, someone would have picked it up already. The joke…
4 min · synthesis
Why Two Stocks at the Same Price Aren't Worth the Same Amount
Imagine two pizzas sitting on a counter. Both cost twelve dollars. One has been cut into eight slices; the other has been cut into a hundred. If someone offers you a slice of each for the same price, …
3 min · foundation
Why Volatility Is Not the Same as Risk
Picture two stocks side by side on a chart. The first one zigzags wildly every week — up 8%, down 6%, up 4%, down 9%. The second one drifts along a nearly flat line, barely moving. Most people, lookin…
3 min · deepening
Why Volatility Is Not the Same as Risk
Imagine two assets. The first drifts upward in a jagged line, gaining ten percent some months and losing eight percent in others, but ending the decade at three times its starting value. The second si…
4 min · deepening