Perhaps this will now sound redundant, I will repeat: binary thinking is dangerous and more importantly it is inaccurate. What I mean by this is not ground-breaking, although lots of wicked-smart dudes like Godel and Sartre have pointed it out in revolutionary sounding ways. Perhaps best conceptualized in the garb of quantum-mechanics, my point is simply [...]
The Short-term Outlook is Dark. The unfortunate reality is that we are going to face tough economic times in the short term. Furthermore, certain “structural” factors in the credit markets have led me to believe that the market prices of assets (including most stocks) have more downside risk than upside potential in the short term. [...]
Decision Making After a week of meeting new people in short spurts of mutual analysis (read: interviews), I am starting to realize that we suffer from an intractable problem: our decision making is only as good as our data and our data is necessarily limited. Whether this be in the context of making decisions about [...]
Humility. I just had one of the most profound conversations that I can remember with a guy who has taken an entirely different path through the same twenty-nine years we have been on the planet to arrive at the same place where I arrived tonight at an event with a bunch of “Internet” people down [...]
As this article on Naked Capitalism points out, some of the smartest pessimists out there are starting to get significantly more bearish lately. I have hesitated to to publish some of this content, but I think it is worthwhile to consider positions like the ones discussed here: Roubini Foresees Possible Market Shutdown After the Fed, [...]
I have often said that I like to try to predict the future. This materializes most concretely in the area of investing – I think the core being an investor is literally attempting to predict how the world will look in the future. If your view is different from other people, and you are correct, [...]
According to Bloomberg, projected losses in the corporate CDO market may approach $1T. CDO Cuts Show $1 Trillion Corporate-Debt Bets Toxic Investors are taking losses of up to 90 percent in the $1.2 trillion market for collateralized debt obligations tied to corporate credit as the failures of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Icelandic banks send [...]
I ordinarily do not like to post simple links here on my blog (I prefer My Twitter page for this). However, I wanted to share this with those of you who don’t use Twitter, as I think you should really check out this content if you have some time. Or rather, you should try to [...]
“I want you to want to clean the dishes.” Brooke Myers to Gary Grobowski in the 2006 movie The Breakup. Today in a philosophy course on free will and morality, we discussed the distinction between first-order and second-order desires. In the above mentioned scene, Jennifer Aniston’s second-order want was frustrated by Vince Vaughn’s lack of [...]
Below are my notes from a panel during this week’s HBS Centennial Celebration. The Panel, hosted by HBS Professor Stacey Childress, featured 4 of the leading entrepreneurs making changes in education nationwide. Steve Barr - Founder of Green Dot; Kevin Johnson – Founder of St. Hope and Sacramental Mayoral candidate; Michelle Rhee - Washington D.C. Schools superintendent, and Wendy [...]