This could also be known as the “everyone else thinks your children are intolerable, while you think they are little angels” bias. People tend to emphasize the positive attributes in things that they already own and discount the bad things. For example, I have an old car that developed a backfire so bad that flames […]

One of the many things that make investing hard is that everything is dependent on context. What is good news in one period is bad news in another. A paper, “Real-Time Price Discovery in Global Stock, Bond and Foreign Exchange Markets” by Torben Andersen et al. looked at this effect as part of a larger […]

“Calendar anomalies” are the excess market returns that are tied to certain time of the year. Some examples are the January Effect, the Turn-of-the-Month effect, the Halloween Effect and the Moon-Phase effect. Calendar effects are probably the easiest anomalies to trade as they require nothing more than an email alert or even an old-fashioned physical […]

It is no exaggeration to say that investing is the art of decision making in uncertain situations. And we are certainly seeing a lot of uncertainty right now. We’ve already discussed the effects of tariffs (TLDR; they are bad), but here we want to look at the uncertainty caused by the administration’s haphazard communications on […]

In 1947, the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit organization that has a general website and also publishes an academic journal, started the “Doomsday Clock”. This is a metaphorical measurement of how close the world is to a global, existential catastrophe caused by humans and their technologies. The idea came about […]