Learn the why. Not just the what.
Investing fundamentals, market logic, and the discipline behind good decisions.
Present Bias: Why Retirement Feels Distant
The systematic overvaluation of near-term outcomes relative to distant ones is one of the most consequential behavioural patterns in personal finance. Understanding the mechanism explains many specific retirement-savings failures.
Trend Following: The Systematic Cousin of Momentum
Trend-following strategies have been implemented systematically for decades in commodity, currency, and futures markets. The long-term record is respectable but volatile, with specific characteristics worth understanding.
Autocorrelation and Why Trends Persist
Short-term serial correlation in price returns is one of the empirical foundations of trend-following strategies. Understanding the mechanism explains why momentum works and why it doesn't work always.
Gaps: Open, Close, and What They Signal
A gap on a chart is a specific and rare event — a price level with no trading. The four common gap types each carry different information about the underlying market conditions.
The COVID Crash and V-Shape Recovery
The February-March 2020 market decline was one of the fastest bear markets in history. The subsequent recovery was equally rapid. Understanding what happened in both directions is one of the more instructive recent case studies.
Mental Accounting: Money Doesn't Know Its Origin
The tendency to treat money differently based on where it came from is one of the most consistently documented behavioural patterns in retail investing. Understanding the mechanism explains many specific portfolio errors.
Market Timing: What the Data Actually Shows
The empirical record of market timing efforts by retail and professional investors alike is unambiguous — most timing efforts underperform simple buy-and-hold strategies. Understanding the specific reasons is essential to any investor tempted by the practice.
Mean Reversion and Its Limits
Mean reversion — the tendency of extended moves to eventually retrace — is one of the most-discussed patterns in markets. Understanding when it applies and when it doesn't is essential to using the concept without being used by it.
Candlestick Basics — Reading One Bar at a Time
Every candlestick bar contains four data points — open, high, low, close — and their relative positions describe the balance between buyers and sellers during that period. Reading a bar is a description, not a signal.
The 2014-2016 Oil Crash
The oil price decline from $107 in June 2014 to $26 in February 2016 was one of the largest commodity price collapses in modern history. The mechanism was specific to a technology-driven supply shock that OPEC misread.
Prospect Theory: Utility Isn't Linear
Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory formalised the specific ways human decision-making deviates from expected-utility theory. Understanding the shape of these deviations explains most of what looks like irrational investor behaviour.
Buy-and-Hold: The Underrated Discipline
Buy-and-hold is treated as a beginner strategy in most retail commentary. The empirical evidence suggests it consistently outperforms more active alternatives — not because it is sophisticated but because it avoids the mistakes active alternatives introduce.
Correlation: The Thing That Breaks in Crises
Correlations between asset classes are often stable over long periods, then suddenly rise sharply during crises. Understanding the mechanism explains why 'diversified' portfolios often fail exactly when diversification is most needed.
Divergence: When Price and Momentum Disagree
Divergence between price and momentum indicators is one of the few technical patterns with meaningful empirical support. Reading it as description rather than as a decision rule is the difference between using it well and being used by it.
The 2010 Flash Crash: When Liquidity Vanishes
On May 6, 2010, the Dow lost nearly 1,000 points in minutes before recovering. The event exposed vulnerabilities in market structure that continue to influence how modern markets are regulated and monitored.
Overconfidence and Trading Frequency
Retail traders who trade frequently produce lower returns on average than those who trade rarely. The mechanism is overconfidence, and the relationship is one of the most consistently documented findings in retail investing.
Dollar-Cost Averaging: What It Solves, What It Doesn't
Dollar-cost averaging is one of the most-praised strategies in retail investing. The mathematics say something more nuanced — DCA solves a specific set of behavioural problems and produces a specific set of trade-offs.
Sector Rotation: The Pulse Beneath the Market
The sequential leadership of different sectors through economic cycles is one of the most reliable patterns in market behaviour. Reading rotation as it happens is one of the more useful analytical disciplines.
Support and Resistance Are Zones, Not Lines
The precise horizontal line drawn on a chart is a visual convention. The actual behaviour of prices near notable levels is better described as a zone of reaction, not a single number.
The 2008 Global Financial Crisis
The 2008 crisis is the reference episode for modern financial system risk. Understanding what actually broke — and how the response prevented a worse outcome — is the essential context for reading any modern credit event.
Base Rate Neglect and the Odds You Never Check
A look at why investors overweight compelling stories and underweight statistical odds, and how reference-class thinking reduces the damage.
The Disposition Effect: Cutting Winners, Holding Losers
The disposition effect is the tendency to sell winning positions too early and hold losing positions too long. It is one of the most consistently documented behavioural patterns in retail investing.
Global Macro Investing and the Big Picture
An overview of global macro investing, its top-down instruments, historical record, and the discipline required to trade economic cycles across borders.
Dividend Growth Investing: Compounding Cash Flow
Dividend growth investing is not a yield strategy. It is a specific bet on the compounding of a company's ability to raise its dividend over many years — a discipline with a specific character and a specific set of trade-offs.