The market's been upside down the past week or so. It all has to do with Japan, and the games big investors play with other people's money. That's why trading is different than investing (for the long term). Taking a long term view, and measuring the things I talk about in my book, help take the craziness out of watching market gyrations.
Interesting investing
Book summary
To remind people about the contents of my book, and to play with writing a post only for (free) subscribers, I wrote an outline of my book sans the story that ties it all together. You have to be logged in to read the whole thing.
David Bressler
It's a fun article to read, and ends with some specific metrics that help you focus on the long term results of your investing journey.
Dollar cost averaging
Was talking to a bunch of people at work about my book... it's interesting to understand the whole process of self-writing and publishing and one of the team happened to mention that they just "dollar cost average in" and keep that money aside for the future. So, I wrote a short piece explaining what dollar cost averaging is and why it's useful:
David Bressler
Financial literacy
If I could accomplish one thing with my book, it would be to bring families together around the "how to invest" discussion. Bridging generations with conversations and actions around generational wealth. There were two posts, one short and one long, I wrote towards that goal.
Did you know that 53% of people are either self-taught or learned from no one about investing? (I'm not sure how those two things are different.)
David Bressler
And if you want to get young kids investing, the ABSOLUTE BEST app out there to do it with is Stockpile. So I wrote a review. I'm a customer, as are my kids.
David Bressler
Enough about investing though.
Interesting news
Vehicle titles going on-chain
If you ever hear the phrase 'crypto wallet' think app framework for a blockchain based app, not "wallet" as in, here's a place I hold my money. I mean, it may hold money, but so does Paypal or Fidelity, and we don't call those wallets.
Here's a story about some blockchain innovation - California is storing vehicle titles on the Avalanche blockchain. They say to prevent fraud, but I bet it also simplifies title transfer and historical ownership records.
Jalopnik
This is one of the first mass-market applications on the blockchain, it'll be super interesting to watch it play out.
Mental health: systemic healthcare challenges
It's a very private issue played out in public. Mental health.
The article states the crux of the problem with a comparison to a broken arm. You have a broken arm, an x-ray shows a broken arm. You are depressed, anxious, or battling PTSD and you have a subjective opinion that's impossible to prove.
Speaking from personal experience, it's impossible to explain. I can work in a noisy coffee shop, but ask me to work in a noisy open-plan and I shut down. Can't do it. Can't do it so much, that I've quit two or three jobs over it. Obviously, I'm not kidding, but how do you explain that to HR? And even if you do, what are they to do? The system isn't designed to deal with bespoke crazy. It's designed for conformity.
Like remote work and rising oceans, this is one of the issues that fascinates me. I'm really curious how it plays out. What alternatives are there for people who "can't" conform. There certainly are more than when I was younger, but I think this is all part of a bigger change in how we live our work lives.
