Archive | July, 2014

Born to (not) Lose

The field of behavioral economics is an interesting one. One of its central tenets is that there is a so called “behavior gap.” This behavior gap describes how much less individual investors earn, on average when compared to the sum of their investments. And the reason for this behavior gap is that in many ways […]

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Flowing Information

This post is really a reflection of the evolving nature of the Miles Game. This flowchart to has become woefully obsolete.  (What with the death of Vanilla Reloads and the inability to load Vanilla Visa products onto your Serve/Bluebird accounts at Walmart.) So below you will find a more current flowchart.  (Though I sadly recognize […]

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Out On a Limb

There is something surprisingly useful about broadcasting your own assumptions to other people There is this concept called “what you see is all there is,” (WYSIATI) discussed extensively in Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast And Slow. And the point of WYSIATI is that our minds (particularly our intuitive “system”) are extremely biased towards narrative. So if […]

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What I Talk About When I Talk About Bonds

Warning: this will not be a particularly well researched or philosophical post. I’ve read my fair share on the subject I’m about talk about, but I’m certainly no expert. The reason I’m writing this post is just to communicate the simple model that I have in my head when I think and talk about bonds. […]

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Current Anatomy

The miles game continues to steam along month after month. There’ve been no dramatic changes to my approach of late but there’ve been some subtle changes that are worth reporting on. My current approach involves: $1000 “spent” in Amazon payments a month between me and my wife’s account. One Isis serve card for both me […]

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Thought Experiments

One of the absolute best things about having this blog is interacting with my readers. There is something about this format that brings together people with similar interests and perspectives and allows for the mixing of ideas and experiences in unusual ways. And on this blog, if there were to be an MVR award (for […]

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Diversions

Smart investing is boring, plain-vanilla, milquetoast. One need only invest in well diversified portfolio of low-cost, passive index stock funds, and just enough bonds to match their own risk tolerance. (And rebalance once every year or two.) And yet here I am several hundred posts into my blog, still writing about investing. And the reason […]

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Gravy

The miles game is not a discrete  object. It cannot be looked at from multiple angles and judged to be a specific thing. Instead it is malleable and plastic. And so it can not help but become a reflection of the player who plays it. In my mind there are three categories of (serious) miles […]

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Embracing Prejudice

If there’s one quote that I’m really a sucker for it is this one; “This above all: to thine own self be true.” That Shakespeare was quite a fellow. In this one simple line he captures so much essential wisdom. Off the top of my head this truism suggests that we should all aspire to […]

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Pitching Camp

Growing up, I don’t ever remember going camping. Backpacking yes, camping no. My father was a bit on the extreme side, you see. (Fortunately these traits are not at all dominant) so backpacking meant packing light, and fishing for dinner, and carrying heavy things for long distances into the Stanislaus wilderness area with the entire […]

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