As long as the pandemic feels like it has lasted, I’m amazed at how quickly we’ve reached the point we’re at today.  Early on, we hoped a vaccine would be ready by sometime in 2021, but maybe it would take longer.  Then once we had a vaccine ready, it seemed optimistic to hope that we’d be vaccinated by the end of 2021.  Then the Canadian federal government promised that every adult who wanted a vaccine would get it by September, and the general reaction was “sure, I’ll believe it when I see it.”  Now it’s starting to look like adults and children as young as 12 who want a vaccine may be fully vaccinated by the end of August.  I know it feels like this has all gone on forever, but our estimates for when it would end have been consistently getting earlier.  There is every reason to believe that the world’s reaction to the next pandemic will be even faster. I managed only one post in the past two weeks: How to Lie to Yourself about a Stock Crash with Statisti...

Wouldn’t it be great if we could predict the future movements of stock markets so we could capture the gains and avoid the losses?  It turns out we can’t, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. After a Twitter exchange with John De Goey, I ended up reading the article The Remarkable Accuracy of CAPE as a Predictor of Returns by Michael Finke.  He gives a chart that appears to show we can predict the coming decade of stock returns by calculating what is known as the CAPE (Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings Ratio). For our purposes, we don’t need to know much about the CAPE other than that it is a measure of how expensive stocks are, and that it was invented by Robert Shiller who received a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2013.  In fact, we don’t even have to calculate the CAPE ourselves; it is freely available and updated daily . Right now, stock prices are very high.  As I write this, the CAPE for U.S. stocks stands at 37.  The only time it was higher in the ...

My attempt to move the email delivery of my articles from Feedburner to follow_it has been anything but smooth.  Follow_it decided to require everyone to click a confirm link at the top of my Test post before they could get more articles.  My wife missed that and apparently many others did too.  I’m not happy with the inane ads follow_it places at the end of my articles, and I don’t like the tracking stuff they add to all links in my articles.  I’m seriously considering eliminating email subscriptions on my blog, but I’ll wait a while longer before making a final decision. Here are my posts for the past two weeks: What Might Have Been Seeking Prophets Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Tom Bradley at Steadyhand asks some very interesting questions.  One good one is “Who is going to buy the flood of low yielding government bonds being issued?”  Another is “Is the political risk around China fully reflected in securities prices?”  I won...

It ain't so much the things that people don't know that makes trouble in this world, as it is the things that people know that ain't so. — Mark Twain. Recently, I was reminded of how difficult it can be to help people with their financial decisions.  What they don’t know isn’t the problem so much as what they think they do know. A young man I’ll call Lucas came to me wondering what to do with a modest sum in employee stock options.  He’s not sure which way the stock market is going, and he’s not sure where his employer’s stock is going.  Is now a good time to sell the options or not? I started by explaining that nobody knows where the stock market or any individual stock is going, and that selling should be based on other considerations, like diversification and needing the money.  I tried to continue with how his best course of action depended on the stock’s price and the strike price as well as the amount involved, but there was little point.  As far as Lucas ...

This is a test post after I tried to fix my blog.  Feedburner is dropping email subscriptions, and I tried to switch them to follow.it.  So, if this worked, emails will look different going forward.  If it didn't work and I broke my feed, I'll have some extra time on my hands.

I’ve let some very lucrative opportunities slip through my fingers over the years.  I won’t call them regrets as I’ll explain later, but I could have ended up with a lot more money than I have now.  Here I describe the top three potential paydays that got away from me. Bitcoin I spent my career as a cryptographer, so it’s not too surprising that I took an interest in the workings of bitcoin when it first appeared.  I learned how it worked and appreciated the clever way it was designed to mimic mining for gold without the need for a central authority.  For a while, that’s as far as my interest went. Later, some enthusiasts formed a group to work on mining bitcoins, and they wanted me to join.  I was tempted, but decided that I had other things to do with my time.  Given the way I tend to get obsessed with technical projects, if I had joined in those early days, I could have mined thousands of bitcoins. When bitcoin prices were manipulated upward to spark the...

Speculation that we’re in a bubble is growing.  I don’t know how to identify bubbles while they’re happening, so the most I can say right now is that the prices of stocks, bonds, and real estate are high.  But let’s suppose for the moment that all three assets are in a bubble.  What are we to do with this information?  Maybe one or more of these assets will crash.  But what if they keep rising for quite a while longer before this crash happens?  What if the economy booms and we grow our way out of the bubble without a crash?  There’s no guarantee that selling assets and waiting for a crash will work out well.  Because I don’t know what’s going to happen, I’m sticking with my investment plan.  The only change I’ve made is to lower my expectations of future investment returns .  So, I haven’t changed the way I invest, but I haven't grown my spending as much as my portfolio’s growth dictates in case future returns disappoint. I managed only...