Tag Archives: Stuff You Should Read

The recent craziness in Gamestop has resulted in a lot of hot takes on short selling. I have the hottest takes, of course, so let’s dive into this a bit deeper and put this debate to rest.  Here’s a piping hot take from the richest man in the world: Wow. That kinda makes sense. But wait, does it really? No, Cullen, stop. Back up. Let’s explain how this works first. Just so we’re all on the same page. Short Selling Basics. This whole convo kinda reminds me of the buyback debates or the...

What a wild year it’s been. You could say that the pandemic was like an entire market cycle all rolled into one year. A boom, a bust and a boom. In January I wrote the following piece about how to manage a crazy booming stock market and avoid the temptation to get overly aggressive. Then just 3 months later I wrote this piece about how to manage a crazy collapse and avoid the temptation to get overly conservative. But this is the battle we constantly wage with ourselves. Successful...

I turn 40 years old today. Since I hate birthday presents I figured I’d pass along some of the presents people have taught me over the last 40 years.  1) Always try to be a good person. This is the most obvious one and also often the hardest one. Life is hard and everyone is fighting their own personal battles. Help them through it by being kind enough to try to understand their battle. 2) Never mistake money for wealth. The person who mistakes money for wealth will live a life...

Did you hear about Tesla? Yeah, it’s up a lot. A lot. A lot. Like, hundreds of percent a lot. Or, 400% from its recent lows. Now, that might not matter much except that that rally now makes Tesla an extraordinarily large business by market cap. At 160B market cap they’re now the 44th largest firm in the world. That’s roughly the same size as McDonalds and larger than Nike. It’s FOUR times the size of Ford and GM. TWO times as large as Ford and GM COMBINED. Whoa. Much of this growth seems...

I am going to spend some time trying to put the debate about Capitalism and Socialism into perspective here. But before we can do that I need to properly define the terms because they’re used in a rather lazy manner in the mainstream media. So, let’s establish some understandings: Capitalism – a system in which the means of production are privately owned and the economic benefits of that production are distributed by the owners and regulated by the government. Socialism – a system in which...

I’m a permaeverything. Not a permabear. Not a permabull. A permaeverything. What the hell does that mean? It means I try to always maintain a relatively balanced exposure across my financial assets. I am never too heavily leveraged to stocks. Never too heavily leveraged to bonds. Never too heavily leveraged to cash. I am balanced. I am permanently bullish AND bearish about everything to some degree.  The Permaeverything mentality is essentially a type of Permanent Portfolio or All Weather...

One of the most confused (and confusing) elements of endogenous money is the idea of “funding”. Endogenous money is not a new theory, but it is not well understood even to this day. Even many supposed endogenous money theorists, like the MMT people, misunderstand it and as MMT has gained some popularity I am seeing increasing misinterpretations. So let’s dive in and see if I can’t explain this more succinctly and clearly. Endogenous money is the fact that anyone can expand their balance...

When we talk about personal finance we often talk about paying off our debts to become financially free. But this is a fallacy of composition. While some households can pay off their debts, the economy actually relies on expanding debt (and assets) to have liquidity and growth. After all, debt isn’t necessarily bad. Yes, there are bad types of debt (like credit card debt which almost always have a negative long-term return), but there are also good types of debt (for instance, when someone...

I’ve noticed a trend in some economic circles that seems to stem from the Positive Money and MMT people – this idea that government “debt” is “equity”. While the taxonomy in mainstream macroeconomics can sometimes be messy I don’t think this is a case where we need to be trying to reinvent well established terms. Let me explain. First off, I understand the desire to create a more coherent taxonomy for terms that seem to have no meaning (for instance, the term “money” in mainstream macro),...

I’ve been careful in my research on money not to call money a “store of value”. There’s a good reason for this which I will try to explain in this piece. In traditional definitions of money three criteria are generally applied: Unit of account Medium of exchange Store of value The first two are uncontroversial. Money needs to be denominated in a unit of account (the USD, Yen, Euro, etc) and it needs to be a medium of exchange. As a store of value, however, the best money cannot serve this...