Unplanned things happen all the time. That was my situation this week when software and hardware decided not to play nice, take out my primary computer, and ruined a well-planned week.

If you’ve ever had the pleasure, you know there’s only two options – fix it or get a new one. As a glutton for punishment, I did both. (Despite the inconvenience, it did provide a healthy break from all things finance, while I focused on fixing things.)

The real issue is recovering years worth of files. The ever increasing size of hard drive storage enables digital hoarding. The process of recovering files, moving them all to a safe place, re-installing software, and organizing everything just the way you had it is a huge time suck and makes for a thrilling week. Continue Reading…

I wanted to mention one more piece from the Buffett lecture that I thought was important but didn’t want to cram more info into the post.

In it, Buffett was directly asked about dealing with failure and here’s what he said: Continue Reading…

Valuation models, like the CAPE ratio, are great for informing investors where the market stands. The models are meant to show how over or undervalued the market is in relation to its historical average. And if you believe that markets revert to a mean, then at some point any excess valuation will swing back to the norm.

Some people see valuation models as a timing tool except none actually say when. Two questions that rarely get asked are how reliable is mean reversion and how relevant is the historical average? Continue Reading…