Nothing kills young companies faster than wasting money.
You see it all the time in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs who burn through their cash. They rent office space with exposed brick walls. Buy expensive nut bars drizzled with dark chocolate.
Meanwhile, their scrappy counterparts move across the bay to Oakland. The rent is cheaper and they know every dollar they waste is stealing a dollar from building whatever needs to be built. Dollars are precious.
I once worked...
One approach to investing is timing the market.
You sell your investments when the market is at a peak and then wait for the next correction or recession to buy them back cheaper.
In practice, this might mean selling 10 shares of company stock at $50 per share and then, when the market crashes and the share price falls to $25 or so, buying back 20 shares with the proceeds. When the price recovers to $50 you’ve juiced your returns by 100%.
Smart, right?
But to...
Holbox is a tiny island in the Gulf of Mexico.
I was there on holiday in 2009 and liked it so much I returned ten years later, but discovered the sleepy fishing village had transformed into a packed tourist trap.
At dinner one night I overheard a guy complaining how congested the island had become. “This is our second time here, but last year there weren’t many tourists. It’s completely changed!”
That got me thinking about perspective....
I was born in 1979. If my parents had invested $1,000 in a no-fee S&P 500 index fund, and had reinvested all dividends, the stake would have grown to be worth $80,601 on my 40th birthday.
That’s a gain of 81 for 1.
Meanwhile, a $1 million investment by the endowment at a college would have grown to over $80 million.
But here’s the math that’s hardest to believe: If the college had paid a seemingly small 2% investment fee, then its gain would have...
Does it seem like everyone but you is becoming fabulously rich and famous?
It makes for a good story. Someone goes from living out of their car to driving a Ferrari. The problem is when they go on to say their success is a result of their morning routine or this one book they read or some random tactic.
You’ve probably heard business icons or celebrities giving this advice. It typically goes something like: “Look, all you need to do is this one thing,...
