Morgan Housel

Morgan Housel is a partner at Collaborative Fund and author of the book The Psychology of Money.


The Dumber Side of Smart People

Most people will die after three days without water.

Read more

A Few Thoughts on Spending Money

There are two ways to use money.

Read more

Information That Would Get Your Attention

I’ve always thought Twitter makes you twice as informed but half as productive.

Read more

Active vs. Passive Learning

If I asked, which do you think will lead to a healthier, happier relationship…

Read more

Respect Each Others’ Delusions

I love the saying that people don’t remember books; they remember sentences.

Read more

Long-Term News

NEW YORK – In what analysts called “the most important economic metric that exists,” 360,000 people were born yesterday, 78%…

Read more

Frugal vs. Independent

Here’s an important distinction about people who spend less than they earn.

Read more

The Full Reset

To understand the power of starting clean, you have to know the nuance of why the German military became as…

Read more

My New Book: Same As Ever

My new book, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes, is out today.

Read more

Wild Minds

Eliud Kipchoge, the world’s best marathon runner, was being held in a staging room during the 2021 Olympic Games in…

Read more

Smart Things I’ve Read Lately

“Until we know we are wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right.” – David McRaney.

Read more

A Few Laws of Getting Rich

There are 13 divorces among the 10 richest men in the world.

Read more

The Thin Line Between Bold and Reckless

Cornelius Vanderbilt had just finished a series of business deals to expand his railroad empire.

Read more

The Written Word

A few thoughts I have about writing…

Read more

A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure About

You don’t have to know exactly what the future holds to know that some people will handle it better than…

Read more

Respect and Admiration

I like the idea of the reverse obituary: Write down what you want your obituary to say, then figure out…

Read more

Intelligent vs. Smart

Here’s an important distinction to make in life.

Read more

A Few Stories About Big Decisions

In 1964, Warren Buffett owned shares in an old industry company with fading prospects.

Read more

How to Read: Lots of Inputs and a Strong Filter

My reading strategy is to start as many books as I can but finish few of them.

Read more

Everything Is Cyclical

French geologists recently discovered that a Himalayan mountain suffered a massive landslide 800 years ago.

Read more

Rich and Anonymous

I think there’s an “ideal” net worth for everyone, when money not only stops bringing pleasure but becomes a social…

Read more

Smart Things Smart People Said

A few lines I came across recently that I liked…

Read more

A Few Questions

Whose life do I admire that is secretly miserable…

Read more

Why You Believe The Things You Do

I remember reading an article years ago about a father in Yemen who lost a son to starvation, only to…

Read more

Compounding Optimism

Let me share a little theory I have about optimism, and why progress is so easy to underestimate.

Read more

Paying Attention

Sherlock Holmes says in the book, The Study of Scarlet…

Read more

Expectations Debt

I live in Seattle, and Amazon is our giant.

Read more

The Spectrum of Financial Dependence and Independence

“I did not intend to get rich.

Read more

Vicious Traps

There are times in nature when two plus two equals ten – when two little things combine to form one…

Read more

Some Things I Think

The fastest way to get rich is to go slow.

Read more

One Big Web: A Few Ways the World Works

Joseph Tussman, a UC Berkeley philosophy professor, wrote in the 1960s that, “What the pupil must learn, if he learns…

Read more

What Makes You Happy

Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, became stuck in Antarctic ice.

Read more

Mental Liquidity

I recently heard a phrase I love: Mental liquidity.

Read more

All Together Now

The Brooklyn Bridge was the largest structure in the western hemisphere when it opened in 1883.

Read more

Psychological Paths of Least Resistance

When faced with a problem, rarely do people ask, “What is the best, perfect, answer to this question?”.

Read more

The Luckier You Are The Nicer You Should Be

An important skill – an incredibly hard one – is identifying when things in your life are temporarily too good…

Read more

How It All Works (A Few Short Stories)

A few short stories whose lessons apply to many things…

Read more

Risk and Regret

David Cassidy’s last words were, “So much wasted time.”.

Read more

Everything You Can’t Have

Nothing is as desired as much as the thing you want but can’t have.

Read more

FOMO: The Worst Financial Trait

A funny thing about money is that it’s a negative art.

Read more

The Art and Science of Spending Money

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch once nearly died of a heart attack.

Read more

Justifying Optimism

What was the happiest day of your life…

Read more

Why Competitive Advantages Die

A few factors I’ve seen pull winners off the podium…

Read more

Ideas That Changed My Life

You spend years trying to learn new stuff but then look back and realize that maybe like 10 big ideas…

Read more

Getting Wealthy vs. Staying Wealthy

Good investing is not necessarily about making good decisions.

Read more

A Few Good Stories

Virtually everything was in short supply during World War II.

Read more

Attention

In school they tell you your paper must be a minimum of five pages long.

Read more

Very Important and Hard to Teach

The most important decisions in your life may be whether to marry, who to marry, and whether to have kids.

Read more

Cumulative vs. Cyclical Knowledge

President James Garfield died because the best doctors in the country didn’t believe in germs, probing Garfield’s bullet wound after…

Read more

Expectations and Reality

In 2004 the New York Times interviewed Stephen Hawking, the late scientist whose motor-neuron disease left him paralyzed and unable…

Read more

Little Rules About Big Things

A few things I’ve come to terms with…

Read more

A Few Good Books

A couple I’ve enjoyed lately…

Read more

Expectations (Five Short Stories)

David Cassidy seemed to have the best life you could imagine.

Read more

Engaging With History

In 1963, LIFE Magazine asked author James Baldwin where he gets his inspiration.

Read more

It’s Supposed To Be Hard

In 1990, David Letterman asked his friend Jerry Seinfeld how his new sitcom was going.

Read more

Good Enough

Spare a thought for the poor guppy fish, who lives a miserable existence but teaches us something important about forecasting.

Read more

Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World

An irony of studying history is that we often know exactly how a story ends, but have no idea where…

Read more

Big Beliefs

A trick to learning a complicated topic is realizing how many complex details are a cousin of something simple.

Read more

Rare Skills

Three rare and powerful skills…

Read more

Reality Catches Up

An asset you don’t deserve can quickly become a liability.

Read more

Tails, You Win

Steamboat Willie put Walt Disney on the map as an animator.

Read more

Little Ways The World Works

If you find something that is true in more than one field, you’ve probably uncovered something particularly important.

Read more

Lifestyles

Fifty-four years ago this month, in a push for publicity, The Sunday Times offered £5,000 to whoever could sail solo…

Read more

Wealth vs. Getting Wealthier

Will Smith writes in his biography that…

Read more

Keep It Going

A quick story about athletes and investors.

Read more

Too Far

Every good idea and every admirable trait can be taken too far.

Read more

Different Kinds of BS

There are three important facts about bullshit: It’s everywhere, it’s influential, and it’s dangerous.

Read more

Endless Uncertainty

The night before the D-Day invasion, a nervous Franklin Roosevelt asked his wife Eleanor how she felt about not knowing…

Read more

Obvious Things That Easily Escape Attention

Dr. Watson walks into a room, and Sherlock Holmes instantly accuses him of hanging out in the club all day.

Read more

Trying Too Hard

Thomas McCrae was a young 19th Century doctor still unsure of his skills.

Read more

A Few Beliefs

Having your views confirmed is a powerful and addictive drug.

Read more

The Rich And The Wealthy

Reggie Vanderbilt was born into a family of bitter feuds, fragile egos, and impossible expectations.

Read more

Never Saw It Coming

People are very good at forecasting the future, except for the surprises, which tend to be all that matter.

Read more

Staying Put

A lot of good ideas are ignored because they’re only occasionally useful.

Read more

Deep Roots

Forecasting is hard because it’s easy to skip the question, “And then what?”.

Read more

How People Think

One hundred billion people have walked this planet.

Read more

Low Expectations

Elon Musk said he had lunch with Charlie Munger in 2009.

Read more

Surprise, Shock, and Uncertainty

A couple things I’ve been thinking about in the last week…

Read more

Now You Get It

Historian Stephen Ambrose writes about World War II soldiers who left basic training full of bravado and confidence, eager to…

Read more

Makes You Think

A few lines I came across recently that got me thinking…

Read more

Six Questions For Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson is one of my favorite writers.

Read more

After The Fact

Let’s say you exercise an hour a day, seven days a week.

Read more

Fluke

Forecasting is hard. And not because people aren’t smart, but because trivial accidents can be influential in ways that are…

Read more

Big Skills

Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, says he doesn’t have any extraordinary skills.

Read more

What A World

A few short stories…

Read more

I Have A Few Questions

They’re relevant to everyone, and apply to lots of things…

Read more

Good Books

The Patriarch. An incredible biography of Joseph Kennedy, who lived one of the most interesting lives in American history.

Read more

Assured Misery

People tend to know what makes them angry with more certainty than what might make them happy.

Read more

How This All Happened

This is a short story about what happened to the U.S.

Read more

Experts From A World That No Longer Exists

The biggest risk to an evolving system is that you become bogged down by experts from a world that no…

Read more

Internal vs. External Benchmarks

There are two ways to measure how you’re doing: Against yourself and against others.

Read more

It Sounds Crazy

A big part of almost every story in history is that expectations move slower than facts.

Read more

Dangerous Feelings

Success has a nasty tendency to increase confidence more than ability.

Read more

History’s Seductive Beliefs

The biggest takeaway from history is that the characters change but their behaviors don’t.

Read more

A Number From Today and A Story About Tomorrow

Every forecast takes a number from today and multiplies it by a story about tomorrow.

Read more

Little Flaws

Not realizing that inarticulate, uneducated, obnoxious, unqualified, and crazy people sometimes have the right answers.

Read more

Rules, Truths, Beliefs

The luckier you are the nicer you should be.

Read more

Other People’s Mistakes

George Carlin once joked how easy it is to spot stupid people.

Read more

The Highest Forms of Wealth

Wealth is easy to measure but hard to value.

Read more

Too Smart

“One of the most persistent fallacies is the reflexive association of wealth with wisdom,” Ed Borgato once wrote.

Read more

Money Rules

Barry Ritholtz asked people for their top 10 money rules last week.

Read more

Little Stories

Early in his career Andrew Carnegie took a train to deliver a bundle of payroll checks to his crew.

Read more

Getting the Goalpost to Stop Moving

There aren’t many iron laws of money.

Read more

Play Your Own Game

Michael Jordan said he had to reconstruct his body when he went from basketball to baseball back to basketball.

Read more

The Limits of Investing Sanity

Read more

The Spectrum of Optimism and Pessimism

At one end you have the pure optimist.

Read more

A Few Short Stories

Thirty-seven thousand Americans died in car accidents in 1955, six times today’s rate adjusted for miles driven.

Read more

The Big Lessons of the Last Year

History is one damned thing after another.

Read more

Five Investing Powers

Rare and helpful…

Read more

Too Much, Too Soon, Too Fast

Some things scale well. Double their size and you get double the output (or more).

Read more

Investing: The Greatest Show On Earth

Let me share two quick stories that have nothing to do with investing.

Read more

The Fed Isn’t Printing As Much Money As You Think

The risk of rising inflation over the next few years is probably the highest it’s been in decades.

Read more

When Everyone’s a Genius (A Few Thoughts on Speculation)

The end of a speculative boom can be inevitable but not predictable.

Read more

A Few Good Books

Some good ones I’ve read lately…

Read more

Best Story Wins

C. R.

Read more

Unfortunate Investing Traits

Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was “The man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him…

Read more

Why It’s Usually Crazier Than You Expect

I want to try to explain why Gamestop went up 100-fold in the last year and why Sears never recovered.

Read more

Personal Finance Philosophies

It can happen to you.

Read more

A Few Thoughts On Writing

You have five seconds to get people’s attention.

Read more

Two Worlds: So Much Prosperity, So Much Skepticism

The demand for forecasts grows after a surprise.

Read more

Last Man Standing

Amazon in 2014 was a puzzle.

Read more

A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure About

If something is impossible to know you are better off not being very smart, because smart people fool themselves into…

Read more

The Reasonable Optimist

Germany’s GDP fell by more than half in 1945, when the end of World War II left a pile of…

Read more

We Have No Idea What Happens Next

To grasp how hard it is to predict what will happen after the world is thrown upside down – as…

Read more

Accountable to Darwin vs. Accountable to Newton

Woodrow Wilson was the only president with a Ph.D.

Read more

Common Causes of Very Bad Decisions

Italian psychologist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini was once asked why people keep making the same mistakes.

Read more

A Few Rules

The person who tells the most compelling story wins.

Read more

What We’re Reading

Speed of innovation…

Read more

Obvious Things That Are Easy To Ignore

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody ever observes,” says Sherlock Holmes.

Read more

Book: The Psychology of Money

My book, The Psychology of Money, is now out.

Read more

Alternative Forms of Wealth

Covid has forced many of us to spend unprecedented amounts of time with a few people (spouses, kids, roommates).

Read more

Expiring vs. Permanent Skills

Robert Walter Weir was one of the most popular instructors at West Point in the mid-1800s.

Read more

The Three Sides of Risk

I grew up ski racing in Lake Tahoe.

Read more

Here We Are: 5 Stories That Got Us To Now

Three days after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, New York City Council President Carol Bellamy joined a group of…

Read more

What Always Changes

A few things that always change, never staying in one place for long…

Read more

The Ugly Scramble

A truth in one field often shines a light on another.

Read more

Good Things Taken Too Far

Penicillin is probably the most important discovery of the last 100 years.

Read more

Lots of Things Happening At Once

“Steve [Jobs] and I will always get more credit than we deserve, because otherwise the story gets too complicated,” Bill…

Read more

Never The Same

Things are different now.

Read more

Permanent Assumptions

If you were told in January what April would look like, you wouldn’t have believed it.

Read more

Acceptable Flaws

Life is a little easier if you expect a certain percentage of it to go wrong no matter how hard…

Read more

What Have We Learned Here?

A few things revealed in recent months.

Read more

When You Have No Idea What Happens Next

Do we know more about what’s going to happen in the next 12 months today than we did in January…

Read more

Who Pays For This?

The federal government will run a $3.8 trillion deficit this year and $2.1 trillion next year.

Read more

What Next? (Two Questions)

Desire for economic forecasts surges right when our ability to accurately forecast plunges.

Read more

The Shock Cycle

At first you don’t see bad news, because it starts small and isn’t reported in traditional outlets.

Read more

Why Time Has Slowed

Time seems to have slowed down.

Read more

Two Things Can Be True At Once

“How are you holding up?”.

Read more

Common Enemies

Everyone wants a map. Just a simple guide to what’s going to happen next.

Read more

Two Things We Know With High Confidence

Unknowns exceed knowns even in the best of times.

Read more

Corona Panic (Part II)

Lots of things now seem obvious in hindsight.

Read more

Different Kinds of Decline

Decline is everywhere these days.

Read more

We’ll Get Through This

In the 1930s an Ohio lawyer named Benjamin Roth kept a detailed diary about what he saw during the Great…

Read more

Death, Taxes, and Three Other Inevitable Things

Life guarantees…

Read more

Corona Panic

It’s OK to not have an opinion on topics you don’t know anything about.

Read more

100 Little Ideas

A list of ideas, in no particular order and from different fields, that help explain how the world works…

Read more

History is Only Interesting Because Nothing is Inevitable

Nothing that’s happened had to happen, or must happen again.

Read more

Useful Laws of the Land

The most important ideas are those that apply to multiple fields.

Read more

Different Kinds of Easy

Jeff Immelt left General Electric in worse shape than he found it.

Read more

What I Believe Least

Belief doesn’t have to be black or white.

Read more

2020: What a Time To Be Alive

A common theme in history is that progress happens too slowly to notice while setbacks happen too quickly to overlook.

Read more

Useful Hacks

“You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.

Read more

The Psychology of Prediction

This report describes 12 common flaws, errors, and misadventures that occur in people’s heads when predictions are made.

Read more

No More Gurus

Avianca flight 052, from Medellin to New York, was circling JFK for landing in bad weather.

Read more

Common Plots of Economic History

Complicated stuff can stem from a handful of common roots.

Read more

The Spectrum of Wealth

Chris Rock joked that Bill Gates would jump out the window if he woke up with Oprah’s money.

Read more

Useful Biases

There was a time when psychology was all about helping people get from bad to normal.

Read more

Why New Technology Is A Hard Sell

Let me tell you about the only time in history a new technology has been adopted by almost everyone virtually…

Read more

Death, Taxes, and a Few Other Things

Life guarantees…

Read more

WeWork Lessons That Apply To Lots of Stuff

No company or investment strategy is proven until it’s survived a calamity.

Read more

Fat, Happy, And In Over Your Head

Having more than you need can be a liability masquerading as an advantage, and no sense of “enough” can look…

Read more

Immutable Truths and Arguing Fools

There are a few things that are so obviously true, and true for everyone, that no one argues about them.

Read more

Short Investing Beliefs

Expecting crazy > expecting average, because the important part of “reversion to the mean” is the reversion, not the mean.

Read more

You Better Love This

Something stupid you can stick with will probably outperform something smart that you’ll burn out on.

Read more

What We’re Reading

Student loans…

Read more

The Laws of Investing

Think of how big the world is.

Read more

Universal Laws of the World

If something is true in one field it’s probably true in others.

Read more

Inseparable Pairs

Hundreds of books and movies have depicted World War II.

Read more

Why Things Break: Easy Causes of Business and Investing Failure

There are a million ways to succeed at business and investing.

Read more

A Few Thoughts On Public Speaking

Next week I’ll give my 100th investing talk in London.

Read more

Financial Advice For My New Daughter

My wife and I welcomed a daughter into the world yesterday.

Read more

Good Ideas Can’t Be Scheduled

“I don’t know why people keep using one-year earnings,” economist Robert Shiller once said.

Read more

Realistic Personal Finance Hacks

Hacks are hard because shortcuts rarely exist.

Read more

Degrees of Confidence

Take a person who is confident in something they know nothing about.

Read more

Five Lessons from History

The most important lessons from history are the takeaways that are so broad they can apply to other fields, other…

Read more

Useful and Overlooked Skills

On his way to be sworn in as the most powerful man in the world, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to…

Read more

You Played Yourself

Medicine used to be all about biology.

Read more

When You’ll Believe Anything

Ali Hajaji’s son was sick.

Read more

You Have To Live It To Believe It

Richard Held and Alan Hein raised 20 kittens in pitch black darkness.

Read more

Fees vs. Fines

The last three months of 2018 was the worst quarter for stocks in seven years.

Read more

Different Kinds of Information

An 1890 Oxford entrance exam question read: “Give some account of the life of Mary, the mother of our Lord.”.

Read more

We Don’t Build Enough Homes

At least relative to history…

Read more

The Value of College

Big life lessons on display in the last few years: Don’t lie to the FBI.

Read more

Counterintuitive Competitive Advantages

This is all that’s left of the Irish elk.

Read more

Recessions: It’s Been a While

It’s been a while since we’ve had a recession…

Read more

Pure Downside, No Silver Lining

There are no exceptions to Newton’s third law of physics.

Read more

Not Caring: A Unique and Powerful Skill

Jiddu Krishnamurti was an Indian philosopher.

Read more

What Else Matters?

Here’s what happened to a bunch of big economies over the last 30 years…

Read more

Different Kinds of Stupid

“The older I get the more I realize how many kinds of smart there are.

Read more

Short Money Rules

Above-average results require not being afraid of looking wrong.

Read more

Why Time Horizon Works

Ben Graham said, “In the short run the market is a voting machine but in the long run it’s a…

Read more

Where Big Leaps Happen

The Bronze Age was a big leap forward because it was one of the first times humans learned how to…

Read more

Origins of Greed and Fear

Greed and fear control everything in investing.

Read more

The Biggest Returns

The biggest energy story of the last four decades has nothing to do with oil or gas.

Read more

When It’s Time To Do Something

The Department of Homeland Security created terrorism warning codes after 9/11.

Read more

Things I’m Pretty Sure About

A few things I’ve been thinking about lately ….

Read more

Wild Expectations

Expectations were not high for Harry Truman when he became president in 1945.

Read more

Investing Ideas That Changed My Life

You spend years trying to learn new stuff but then look back and realize just a few big ideas changed…

Read more

Rational vs. Reasonable

I’m going to explain why it’s OK to make irrational investment decisions.

Read more

An Interpretation of Stated Odds

100% odds: Either accurate and nothing you can do about it or inaccurate and self-deluded.

Read more

Drip, Drip, Drip

“This year,” says the narrator, “thanks to Hitler and Hirohito, taxes are higher than ever before.

Read more

Selfish Writing

Howard Marks’ book The Most Important Thing has sold three-quarters of a million copies.

Read more

When Things Get Wild

Every past decline looks like an opportunity, every future decline looks like a risk.

Read more

No One is Crazy

At one point last week Florida was selling 550 lottery tickets per second.

Read more

Humble Exits

Jack Welch allegedly passed a note across the table to Jerry Seinfeld.

Read more

Rube Goldberg

Here’s what happens when interest rates rise.

Read more

Time Horizon vs. Endurance

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink once told a story about having dinner with the manager of one of the world’s largest…

Read more

Risk Management

Risk management starts with what Jeff Bezos calls the “regret minimization framework.” Project yourself to age 80, or age 90.

Read more

Different Kinds of Smart

“The older I get the more I realize how many kinds of smart there are.

Read more

Fool Me Three Times And I Give Up

The most significant part of the financial crisis that peaked ten years ago this month was that it took place…

Read more

Newcomers

Author Robert Coram once wrote about military promotions…

Read more

Concealed Emotions

Two forces control every investment market: 1) money is emotional, 2) most people don’t think they’re emotional.

Read more

People vs. Companies

One month after Japan surrendered World War II, General Douglas MacArthur met Japanese emperor Hirohito.

Read more

The Trajectory of Great Ideas

One day you wake up and realize you have a great idea.

Read more

Natural Maniacs

No one should be shocked when people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about…

Read more

Appealing Fictions

“What was the happiest day of your life…

Read more

Real World vs. Book Knowledge

Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber, once described his attempt to become a lawyer in the 1920s…

Read more

Mindsets: Optimism vs. Complacency vs. Pessimism

A real optimist wakes up every morning knowing lots of stuff is broken, and more stuff is about to break.

Read more

The Lifecycle of Greed and Fear

All greed starts with an innocent idea: that you are right, deserve to be right, or are owed something for…

Read more

Little Money Rules

Emotions can override any level of intelligence.

Read more

Theranos Lessons

Fifteen months before his Ponzi scheme unraveled, Bernie Madoff made an astounding comment.

Read more

Repeating Themes

How much of the “history” of business and investing – particularly explanations for why things happened – is a wildly…

Read more

The Psychology of Money

Let me tell you the story of two investors, neither of whom knew each other, but whose paths crossed in…

Read more

“If I Were Wrong, What Would It Look Like?”

Lakshman Achuthan went on TV in 2011 and predicted a recession was near.

Read more

If Collaborative Fund Invested in Public Stocks

What if we could merge a private-markets mindset with public-market opportunities…

Read more

Nobody Planned This, Nobody Expected It

The Battle of Stalingrad was the largest battle in history.

Read more

Everyone Needs Help

A fascinating part of VC is sitting on the board of directors of companies you invest in.

Read more

Rules in the Textbooks, Guidelines in the Trenches

A study three years ago figured out how to save more than 100,000 lives a year.

Read more

Some Things I’m Pretty Sure About

I increasingly don’t believe in gurus, in any field.

Read more

An Art Leveraging A Science

Albert Einstein’s favorite idea was called gedankenerfahrung.

Read more

How to Talk to People About Money

Clarence Hughes went to the dentist in 1931.

Read more

Why We Listen To Bad Forecasts

London had 120,000 residents in 1523.

Read more

Ironies of Luck

Paul Tudor Jones was one of the most successful traders in the world.

Read more

Expectations vs. Forecasts

I expect there to be one or two recessions per decade.

Read more

Why I’m Bullish on Gen Z

The oldest millennials are in their late 30s.

Read more

Making Sense vs. Being Right

People tend to care about something making sense more than they care about something being right.

Read more

It’s Hard To Predict How You’ll Respond To Risk

I grew up with a friend who came from neither privilege or natural intellect, but was the hardest-working guy I…

Read more

Risky Business

Most things are going well for most investors.

Read more

The Thrill of Uncertainty

By the end of the study, pigeons were pecking a food lever up to five times per second “for as…

Read more

Making History By Doing Nothing

Anthony Eden had just finished resigning as prime minister of the United Kingdom.

Read more

The Greatest Story Ever Told

Capitalism’s success is built on a belief – a story – that, given the right incentives, people can work together…

Read more

Solving Hard Problems With Simple Ideas

To wrap your head around how good we are at solving hard problems with simple solutions, consider how much of…

Read more

How To Read Financial News

October 27th, 1929.

Read more

What We’re Reading

A few good articles the Collab team came across this week ….

Read more

Conflicting Skill Sets

F. Scott Fitzgerald said intelligence is “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time…

Read more

Great Products vs. Great Businesses

In January 2004, when Facebook was a days-old dorm room project, Mark Zuckerberg was asked by a friend whether he…

Read more

Thankful for What Didn’t Happen

I’m thankful for family, friends, good health, etc.

Read more

We’re All Innocently Out of Touch

Seven billion people on this planet share a flaw: They’re out of touch with almost everyone else.

Read more

Never Do That Again

On November 12, 2001, American Airlines flight 587 took off from JFK with 260 people onboard, en route to the…

Read more

What I Read (And Why)

Paul Volcker once joked that the ATM is the only useful financial invention of the last 50 years.

Read more

The Freakishly Strong Base

The earth used to be covered in ice.

Read more

The Theory of Maybes

Isaac Newton was a scientific genius at a time when scientists were often denounced as heretics.

Read more

A Decade Watching the Craziest Game

Investing is the craziest game I’ve ever seen.

Read more

The Shallow Benefit of Deep Liquidity

At some point in the last few years high-frequency traders began using picoseconds to measure the time needed to execute…

Read more

Saving Money and Running Backwards

Wealth has a curse. It’s called the hedonic treadmill.

Read more

How To Make The Economy Grow

The Gary Works steel plant in Gary, Indiana, is the largest steel mill in North America.

Read more

Skills vs. Behavior

Walk into a music store in the 1970s, and you were almost certainly looking at a product made by General…

Read more

Make Your Point and Get Out of the Way

No one likes their time wasted.

Read more

The Four Fundamental Skills of All Investing

In his book Succeeding, John Reed wrote one of the smartest things I’ve ever read…

Read more

Overcoming Your Demons

Seven years ago this month I was at an investing conference in Vancouver.

Read more

What I Learned in the Last year

This is how it started…

Read more

The Unsolvable Puzzle

Leo Szilard was one of the smartest people of the 20th Century.

Read more

Why Everyone Should Write

Everyone should write. You know why? Because everyone is full of ideas they’re not aware of.

Read more

An Honest Business News Update

NEW YORK – The S&P 500 closed at a new high on Wednesday in what analysts hailed as the accumulated…

Read more

The Most Dangerous Kind of Learning

Thomas McCrae was a young 19th Century doctor still unsure of his skills.

Read more

This is Hard Because Nothing is Black or White

Business is not easy. Investing is not easy.

Read more

Betting on Things That Never Change

Amazon launched 22 years ago this week.

Read more

Every Great Investment Hurts

Jeff Immelt stepped down as CEO of General Electric last month.

Read more

What I Believe Most

Ten things that guide almost everything I think about in business and investing…

Read more

Sustainable Sources of Competitive Advantage

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com.

Read more

The Best Simple Business Models

Most CEOs are very smart.

Read more

The Seduction of Pessimism

Pessimism is intellectually seductive in a way optimism only wishes it could be.

Read more

The Power of Failing Well

Amazon’s Fire Phone was a failure.

Read more

Jay Regan, Investing Pioneer, on Hedge Funds, Fees, and Competitive Markets

Ed Thorp wrote the book Beat the Dealer in 1962.

Read more

Expiring vs. Long-Term Knowledge

How much of what you read today will you still care about a year from now…

Read more

Bad Experiences

To understand how we process risk, you have to know the story of Austria’s 40-year-old nuclear power plant that has…

Read more

The Advantage Of Being A Little Underemployed

To realize how outdated the five-day, 40-hour workweek is, you have to know where it came from.

Read more

23 Books That Changed My Life

Google researchers tried to count how many books have been published.

Read more

A Simple Guide to the End of the Boom

Few answers to questions have as bad a track record as “What is the economy going to do next?”.

Read more

Stories vs. Statistics

Air travel plunged after September 11th 2001.

Read more

Staying Competitive as the World Changes

Capitalism is one big competition.

Read more

Stress and Comfort: Careful What You Wish For

The summer of 1932 was the darkest period the American economy had ever seen.

Read more

Short Investing Rules

1. Define what you’re incapable of and stay away from it.

Read more

What We Said When the World Changed

Few things transformed the 20th century like the car and the airplane.

Read more

Risk is How Much Time You Need

One of the craziest things about investing is that you can be wrong half the time and still do well.

Read more

Six Questions for Brent Beshore

Brent Beshore is one of the most impressive people I’ve met.

Read more

Busy vs. Productive

“What is the gravest crisis facing the American people in the year ahead?”.

Read more

Business Advice From a One Year Old

The day after he was born, I wrote my son a list of money advice.

Read more

Let Me Convince You To Save Money

The first idea – simple but easy to overlook – is that building wealth has little to do with your…

Read more

Surviving the Continuous Chain of Disappointments

Ed Thorp was the first person to systematically beat casinos at blackjack.

Read more

Multiple Points of View

We all have different jobs in different companies in different industries.

Read more

Getting Rich vs. Staying Rich

Abraham Germansky was a multimillionaire real estate developer in 1920s.

Read more

The Making of a Brand

An amazing thing about life before 1850 is that most people never experienced a world more than a few dozen…

Read more

Everyone Is Still Learning

Phil Knight started Nike in the 1970s.

Read more

Business Lessons From Other People’s Jobs

My friend Patrick O’Shaughnessy is a professional investor with a book club.

Read more

You Can See Where This is Going

More than $30 trillion will be transferred from baby boomers to their children in the coming decades.

Read more

How To Read

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time,” says Charlie Munger.

Read more

A Chat With Daniel Kahneman

I attended a dinner last night with Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics and the…

Read more

Six Questions for Shane Parrish

Shane Parrish is one of the smartest people I know.

Read more

Grandmasters of Work

Garry Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue computer in 1997.

Read more

The Difference Between Impatience and Having No Tolerance for Inefficiency

Someone asked me last month why millennials are so impatient.

Read more

New Year’s Acceptances

Rather than resolutions, I want to come to terms with a few things in 2017.

Read more

The Power of Brutal Honesty

Matthias Rothmund left a surgical clamp inside a patient, which is the kind of thing you’d think would hurt a…

Read more

The Tyranny of Improvement

There is no evidence that mammographers make better diagnoses as they gain experience.

Read more

Lazy Work, Good Work

John D. Rockefeller was the most successful businessman of all time.

Read more

The Art and Science of Investing

Technology is a science. It’s semiconductors and code and batteries.

Read more

The Bad Side of a Good Idea

The number of publicly traded U.S.

Read more

Writing Lessons for a Better Life

Writing is one of those things you’ll need to be decent at no matter what business you’re in.

Read more

The Best Way to Fund Your Business

Your business needs money.

Read more

The Difference Between a Statistic and a Fact

A simple idea that helps explain a lot of disagreements is that there’s a difference between a statistic and a…

Read more

Overlooked Truths of Business and Investing Success

Here are a few things that generally aren’t taught in school but I’ve noticed are vital in business and investing…

Read more

Four Things I Learned from the Book “What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars”

The investment industry is short on three things…

Read more

Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions

“One of the most persistent fallacies is the reflexive association of wealth with wisdom,” investor Ed Borgato tweeted this week.

Read more

How Investors Should Deal With Surprises

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman said something really smart on a recent podcast with Barry Ritholtz…

Read more

The New Business Strategy: Be A Little Nicer To Everyone

Craig Shapiro.

Read more

The Long Run Is Just A Collection of Short Runs

Every great idea can be taken too far.

Read more

What’s Something You Strongly Believe That’s Likely Wrong?

Let’s agree on three things…

Read more

The Most Complicated Simple Problems

“Investing isn’t complicated. You just buy stocks when they sell for less than they’re worth.”.

Read more

The Most Overlooked Trait of Investing Success

I once asked a doctor: What’s the hardest part of your job…

Read more

Explaining Old Products To My Son

My son turns one next week.

Read more

The Difference Between a Bubble and a Cycle

Brace yourself.

Read more

Today’s Innovations Are Tomorrow’s Baseline

Tony Hawk was the best skateboarder of all time.

Read more

The Hierarchy of Earning Profit

The joke has been around for years…

Read more

Get Rid of the Boring

“If you were financially independent – say you had $100 million – would you still work here?”.

Read more

Old World, New World

Here’s an iron rule of economics…

Read more

What A Time to Be Alive

John D. Rockefeller was the richest man the world had ever seen.

Read more

Good News: There’s Nowhere Left to Hide

Here’s my theory.

Read more

Simple Rules of Capitalism

You can’t accurately describe how complicated the global economy is.

Read more

When You Change the World and No One Notices

Do you know what’s happening in this picture? Literally one of the most important events in human history.

Read more