Learn the why. Not just the what.
Investing fundamentals, market logic, and the discipline behind good decisions.
Why You Hold Losing Stocks Too Long and Sell Winners Too Soon
The disposition effect is one of the most reliably documented anomalies in investor behaviour. Investors systematically sell their winning positions too early and hold their losing positions too long—precisely backwards from what produces long-run wealth.
The Fear of Loss That Prevents You From Ever Winning
There is a form of financial paralysis that presents itself as prudence. The investor who keeps the bulk of her savings in cash is not being cautious in any meaningful sense—she is being loss averse in a way that masquerades as caution.
Why Losing $1,000 Feels Worse Than Gaining $1,000
The asymmetry between the pain of losses and the pleasure of gains is among the most robustly documented findings in behavioural economics, and among the most consequential for investment outcomes.
The Hidden Cost of Impatience in Investing
Compounding is among the most counterintuitive phenomena in mathematics, and the gap between its theoretical appreciation and its practical application is one of the most consequential in personal finance.
Short-Term News, Long-Term Damage
The financial news cycle operates on a fundamental mismatch with the time horizon at which most wealth is built. News concerns what is new—what has changed recently. The investor building wealth over decades has almost no use for this kind of information.
Why Checking Your Portfolio Every Day Is Hurting You
The democratisation of financial information has been, in most respects, a genuine advance. Yet the evidence on investor outcomes suggests that more information and easier access have not translated into better decisions. In many cases, the reverse appears to be true.
The Trap of 'I Knew It All Along' (Hindsight Bias)
After every major market event, the same remarkable phenomenon occurs. Commentators who failed to predict the crash explain, with great confidence and considerable retrospective detail, exactly why the crash was inevitable.
Why You're Obsessed With Today's Price and Missing the Bigger Picture
A stock's price on any single day tells you almost nothing about what the underlying business is actually worth. Financial economists made peace with this fact decades ago; nobody…
When Confidence Becomes Dangerous in Investing
Confidence is not uniformly virtuous. In most domains of human activity, it broadly correlates with performance. The financial markets are one of the significant exceptions—and the failure to appreciate this is responsible for an enormous amount of wealth destruction.
The Role of the Federal Reserve in Asset Prices
No single institution exerts more influence over asset prices than the central bank. Understanding how its decisions ripple through markets is essential to understanding why markets move as they do.
Why You Think You're a Better Investor Than You Actually Are
There is an odd asymmetry in how people size up their own investing skill. Poll a room of investors on whether they're better than average and most hands go up -- which is…
What "Market Structure" Actually Means
The phrase "market structure" is used constantly and defined rarely. At its core it describes the pattern of highs and lows that reveals whether a market is trending, ranging, or turning.
Supply and Demand as the Only Real Law
Beneath every indicator, pattern, and theory lies a single irreducible truth: price is set by the balance between those who wish to buy and those who wish to sell. Everything else is commentary on this.
Market Breadth and the Health of a Rally
A rising index can conceal a deteriorating market. Breadth measures how many stocks are actually participating, revealing whether an advance rests on broad strength or a narrow and fragile few.
Risk-On, Risk-Off: The Market's Two Moods
Markets swing between two collective moods: an appetite for risk and a flight from it. Recognising which mood prevails explains why unrelated assets so often move together, against all logic of their fundamentals.
The Bond–Equity Relationship
Stocks and bonds are often treated as separate worlds, but they are two halves of a single conversation about risk, return, and the price of money. Reading them together reveals what neither shows alone.
How Interest Rates Reprice Everything
Interest rates are not merely one factor among many. They are the gravitational constant of finance, the rate against which every asset is valued, and when they move, they reprice the entire financial universe.
Liquidity Is the Tide That Moves All Boats
Beneath the analysis of individual assets runs a deeper force that affects everything at once: the availability of money itself. Liquidity is the tide, and when it rises or falls, it moves all boats together.
Market Cycles: Why the Pattern Repeats
Markets move in cycles of expansion and contraction that repeat across generations. The patterns recur not because history is fixed but because the human nature that drives them never changes.
Sector Rotation and the Flow of Capital
Capital does not sit still. It flows between sectors in response to the economic cycle, and understanding where it tends to move, and why, reveals a logic beneath movements that otherwise seem random.
The Limits of Technical Analysis
Having spent thirty essays examining the tools of technical analysis, honesty demands a clear account of what these tools cannot do. Knowing the limits is what separates a disciplined practitioner from a true believer.
Dow Theory: The Foundation Beneath Modern Charts
Nearly everything in modern technical analysis traces back, whether its users realize it or not, to a body of ideas assembled more than a hundred years ago under the name Dow Theory…
Elliott Wave Theory Without the Mysticism
Elliott Wave Theory sits in a strange spot in market analysis -- it draws fierce loyalty from its believers and just as fierce dismissal from its critics, often for the same underlying…
Building a Two-Indicator Confirmation System
Every single indicator eventually fails, and that failure naturally points toward combining tools. But combine them carelessly and you just multiply the confusion, so the path between…