Swart Donkey

Life is random, ambiguous, and complex. Sometimes things can be interpreted in multiple different ways. That’s okay.  We interpret the world...

No one has a view of the whole picture, or the ability to process it. We do not know in advance what the correct destination is, or what our...

Autonomy suggests individual decision making. If it is abstract (controlled and theoretical), it works very well.  In reality, our  decision...

Financial Planning starts with a conversation about you and your relationship with money . The goal being to understand your risk tolerance....

Some of our waves of money anxiety are memories. Both of our own experiences and those of the bubble we are born into and raised in. These t...

“Past performance  is used as a guide only. It is no guarantee of future returns. Your investment can go up and down and you may not get bac...

Choices are made in baskets. Once one is made, the set of options changes. There are both intended and unintended consequences. To explore, ...

Actions have consequences. Some are intended. Intention and incentives matter, but the world is so complicated (and getting more so) that ...

I don’t agree that there is a trade-off between risk and return. You don’t make money by taking risks (unless you are an Insurance Company...

Reversion to Mean is the reliable default assumption that you should take “this changes everything” with a pinch of salt. Habits run deep....

Bottom-up Stock Picking is equivalent to seeing people as individuals and communities rather than abstract prejudices. It’s easier to simp...

You don’t learn much about whether a process works, when it is working. The most powerful creative forces are time and consistency. But fo...

Delegating responsibility without authority is dangerous. I have always had a lot of respect for leaders who remain involved in the task. ...

Milk doesn’t come from the shops. It comes from Cows. Most of the products we now end up using are assembled from bits that come from all ...

“ The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent ” warned John Maynard Keynes. “ When there is nothing particularly cleve...

“Survival of the Fittest” suggests a level of knowledge in advance. This is hindsight bias. Normally there is a base level of fitness, and...

Negativity sells. We have a bia s toward dra ma and extremes. Talking about slow, long-term, progress doesn't lead to the sense of urge...

I don't believe everything happens for a reason  (pulled). I don't believe everything happens because of something (pushed). I bel...

Reality is a shared hallucination. Through trial and error, it is real if we agree that it is... and if that agreement has meaning and powe...

I managed to catch up with a friend yesterday who is a big fan of the writing of David Foster Wallace . I had watched most of (the plane la...