Latest Posts

• Lettuce

  I planted some little gem lettuce seeds, but I’ve been having trouble with germination. Either lack of light exposure or too low soil temperatures. I planted 3 seeds per soil block. Starting 4 soil blocks a week to get some succession planting going.

• Single Fund Portfolio

  I asked Gemini to help me choose between mutual funds.

• Book of the Week: The Speed of Sound

  Thomas Dolby has no affiliation of Dolby Laboratories. I got this book, because I thought it was an origin story of Dolby Labs. Instead I got …

• Book of the Week: The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

  This week I read The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John C. Bogle after finding out he has Enough. First thought is that do I still need to read this book if I’m already an index investor. Does he need to speak to the choir? I’ve been a long time convert after reading Unconventional Success. Beating the stock market is a zero-sum game.

• The Little Book Of Common Sense Investing

  This week I read The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John C. Bogle after finding out he has Enough. First thought is that do I still need to read this book if I’m already an index investor. Does he need to speak to the choir? I’ve been a long time convert after reading Unconventional Success. Beating the stock market is a zero-sum game.

  Time makes more converts than reason —Tom Paine

  People are irrational, but math wins in the end. You just have to survive long enough to see it win.

  It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it.

  People are finance are stupid and they are paid to stay that way.

• Book of the Week: Enough

  This week I read Enough: True Measures of Money, Business and Life by John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard Mutual Fund Group. He had his first heart attack in 1960, but is still alive today. We focus too much on things that can be counted. You get what you measure. I’m tired of the rat race and wonder when I will have enough? What happens when you don’t have enough? Will I ever have enough? Jack can talk about enough since he clearly has enough already. When you’re rich and retired, you need to occupy your time, writing a book is one of those things. I will keep working until the day I have enough. I hope that day was yesterday

• Book of the Week: Bad Paper

  This week I read Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld by Jake Halpern. I picked up this book after hearing about it on Planet Money: The Buffalo Talk-Off. The book was better than I expected. I found out about a side of the economy that I would probably never experience, debt collection. I always pay my debts, but most Americans owe money. Debt Market Banks are required to take a loss on a loan after 180 days if you stop payments under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). They need to get it off their books. To still extract money from defaulted loans, they will sell them for pennies on the dollar to debt collection agencies. Those agencies try to collect debt and make big profits, but sometimes they can’t collect all the debt and resell what’s left for less than pennies on the dollar. This keeps getting passed to the lower and lower rungs of debt collection agencies until it eventually reaches a lawyer, who will try to sue and get judgment to garnish wages. But there is no paper trail other than a spreadsheet. If you actually show up in court and ask the lawyer to prove their case, they will drop the case, because they can’t. So if you borrow money, ignore debt collectors and show up in court to tell them to prove your case, you never have to repay your loans. You have to be careful about not making a payment, because that could reset the statute of limitations. You’ll just have shitty credit, which doesn’t matter if you deal in the cash economy. Some unscrupulous individuals will try to sell paper without a clear line of ownership and sell the same paper to multiple people. Ex-cons can’t find legitimate jobs except through other ex-cons who run debt collection agencies. Debt collection turns out to be more profitable than selling drugs on the corner. Some debt collections will do illegal things like threatening physical harm or making false statements about jail and lawsuits.

• Book of the Week: Effective Modern C++

  This wee I returned Effective Modern C++ to the library after only reading the first few items. Wasn’t work reading it unless I was currently in the middle of writing C++ code. I found out what auto means. C++ has changed a lot over the years. I have some catching up to do, but C++98 can still get me somewhere.

• Book of the Week: Lombard Street

  This week I partially read Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market by Walter Bagehot, because this book was reference in another book that I read. This book was written in 1873. Normally I’d be really interested in books like these. I am, but I need to focus on cut down on nonessential reading since I can’t absorb any information while my mind is somewhere else. It is funny that money hasn’t changed much in over 100 years. What was applicable back then is still applicable today. Amazing. Ties in nicely with how finance enables large scale projects like railroads and how banking is built on credit and trust. Since I moved to privately published posts, I feel no obligation to write more. Like Marie Kondo says, remove stuff that doesn’t bring joy.

• Book of the Week: How Google Tests Software

  

• Book of the Week: The ETF Book

  This week I read The ETF Book, because I’m procrastinating. I though this would be a really boring and dry subject, but I learned a few things. I learned that Vanguard has a patent on Vanguard Index Participation Receipts (VIPERs), the structure of their ETFs, which are special class shares of their mutual funds. When you’re buying something, you should know what you’re buying. There are many different type of exchange portfolios as detailed below. | Grantor Trusts | Investment Trust | Exchange-Traded Notes (ETN) | Unit Investment Trust (UIT) | RIC Open-Ended ETF | RIC Vanguard ETF
  —|—|—|—|—|—|—
  SEC Registration Act | 1933 | 1933 | 1933 | 1940 | 1940 | 1940
  Company dividend reinvested | No | No | Implied | No | Yes | Yes
  Portfolio pays dividends | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes
  Redemption in-kind option | Yes | No | No | No | No | No
  Tracking error | NA | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes
  Credit risk of issuer | No | No | Yes | No | No | No
  Manager discretion | NA | Yes | No | Restricted | Yes | Yes
  Allows concentrated positions | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No
  Traditional fund share class | No | No | No | No | No | Yes
  Economic Cycle Investing

• Book of the Week: Light on Yoga

  This week I read Light on Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar, because I want to enhance my practice. This is the bible on yoga. It has descriptions and photos of 200 asanas, different yoga postures. The appendix has a 300 week course if you want to be able to do all the poses. Although many fail to get past week 166. It is recommended that you do your practice under a guru. The origins of the word guru come from gu, darkness and ru, light. You need control over the mind to be absent of desire, fear and anger. It is thought that the loss of semen leads to death and its retention to life. 8 Stages of Yoga