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Where crypto fits
Neither cheerleading nor sneering: what a blockchain actually is, why a coin can be priced but never valued, and the small, honest place crypto can occupy in your finances, if it occupies one at all.
Blog
Reading businesses, in writing
Field notes on value investing and the craft behind tenbagger — no predictions, no tips, just how we think about durable businesses.
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Renting vs. buying a home
Rent is not thrown away and a house is not an automatic win. The honest arithmetic of renting versus owning: unrecoverable costs, a worked example, and the questions that actually decide it.
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Your first brokerage account, step by step
What a broker actually is, what happens to your money if it fails, and how to open an account and place a first order. The practical article nobody writes.
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Manias V: 2008
A machine built from mortgages, bundles, and AAA stamps, where every link in the chain was paid on volume and nobody held the truth. The final mania of the series, and the equipment that let some people walk through it intact.
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Manias IV: the dot-com crash
The internet really did change everything, and the people who believed it lost fortunes anyway. The mania that proves being right about the future is not the same as being right about the price.
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Manias III: 1929
New York, October 1929: how buying stocks with 10% down turned a boom into a doom loop, and why the crash ruined the leveraged and spared the patient.
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Manias II: the South Sea Bubble
London, 1720: a company with Parliament's blessing, the king's name, and almost no actual business. How respectability inflated a bubble and why intelligence could not escape it.
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Manias I: tulip mania
Amsterdam, 1637: the most famous bubble in history. What people actually believed, how a flower detached from reality, and why the legend itself is part of the lesson.
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Get-rich-quick traps and scams
Investment fraud is an industry, and its target market is people who just started paying attention to money. The red flags that never change, how Ponzi and pyramid schemes actually work, and the five questions that stop them.
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Why you sabotage yourself
No crash and no scammer will cost you as much as your own brain on a bad day. The five biases that reliably wreck returns, and the guardrails that keep them away from your money.
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Diversification vs. concentration
Spreading out is the only free lunch in investing, and the people who built the great fortunes mostly ignored it. Both sides of the oldest argument in portfolios, with the arithmetic that settles who should listen to which.
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Retirement accounts and running your own money
A retirement account is a tax wrapper, not a product. Why the wrapper is close to a no-brainer, what the industry does with the inside, and how to keep both the tax break and control.
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Stock picking: the honest version
Most articles about picking stocks flatter you. This one gives you the real odds, the full price of admission, and the one honest reason to do it anyway.
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Index funds and the spectrum of investing
An index fund does not remove the bet, it removes the stock-level decisions. What indexing actually is, why fees matter more than skill, and how to name the story you are betting on in one sentence.
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Inflation, time, and the power of compounding
Cash in a drawer loses a third of its buying power in twenty years, and €200 a month from age 25 outgrows €400 a month from 40. The arithmetic of time, shown honestly.
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The myth of the financial expert
Most fund managers lose to a boring index, and many advisors are salespeople in better suits. The one question that cuts through it: who pays this person, and what are they paid to sell you?
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How banks actually work
Your money is not sitting in a vault, and your deposit is legally a loan. How banks really work, what deposit protection covers, and how to make different banks do different jobs for you.
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Credit cards and debt
One habit decides whether a credit card is a free tool or a nineteen-year trap. The real arithmetic of minimum payments, a sane order of attack for existing debt, and what credit scores actually do.
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Find your number
Most people cannot say what one month of their life costs, and every money decision they make is guesswork because of it. Track for a season, learn your number, then build on it in the right order.
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Conscious spending
Detailed budgets fail because they are built to fail. The alternative: spend heavily on the one or two things you love, cut the rest without guilt, and give every euro one of four jobs.
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Nobody is coming to manage your money
The four excuses that keep people from starting with money, why none of them survive contact with reality, and the one shift that changes everything: you are the owner, not a passenger.
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The 85% solution
Perfectionism is procrastination wearing a suit. Why a good-enough money decision made today beats a perfect one made never, shown with real arithmetic.
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The psychology of money
A janitor died with $8 million and a Harvard-educated Merrill Lynch executive went bankrupt. Money is not a spreadsheet subject, it is a behaviour subject, and this article is the upstream layer everything else depends on.