Month: January 2019

Another huge week for the stock market. The S&P 500 is now at 2660, a gain of 40 points from my earlier update and a YTD return of now 6.5% in just 18 days and a 12.5% return off the lows. Although the market is…

Psychologist Dr. Patrick Lockwood wonders why there is so much discussion about IQ, when other factors such as the “big 5″ and emotional intelligence are (according to him) more important. I disagree that the “big 5″ is important or useful. The reason is, unlike IQ,…

Saw this interesting question and discussion on Reddit: You have (probably) never encountered a Chinese shill on Reddit, in which the author explains why Chinese shills on Reddit likely don’t exist. The economics of it don’t make sense.   Being fluent in English at a…

Is it too soon to be celebrating correct 2019 predictions? Earlier in the week I predicted that the Euro would fall against the US dollar, and indeed over the past week it has fallen mightily from 1.154 to 1.139, which is one of the strongest…

Yes, there people who are successful at business without having a high IQ, such as in retail or auto, by applying ‘social skills’ such as negotiation to get what one wants, but this is very few people. Trump used negotiating skills to build his real…

Venture Capitalist Howard Lindzon makes his 2019 predictions, writing: I believe that we will have a different President of the United States by the end of 2019. The catalyst for this change will be a devastating report issued by Robert Mueller that outlines a history…

There is tentative talk about Trump wanting to fire Fed chief Powell, which I don’t believe will happen. The consensus by pundits is that this will have serious negative consequences. From Forbes, How Trump Could Fire Powell And Rebuild The Fed: And from Vox, Trump’s…

This is the third and for now final chapter of the Taleb IQ series. See part 1 and part 2. It has been almost two weeks since Taleb’s original anti-IQ Twitter rant and four days since the publication of a Medium blog post also attacking…

It has been three weeks since the shutdown began yet these has been no significant interruption. For most people, the changes are imperceptible. This vindicates to some degree the libertarian position that most government employees and programs are useless/redundant/unnecessary. One of the most common arguments…

There are a plethora of stories of how hard millennials’ lives are and how they are the ‘poorest generation’. However, I think many of these studies and stories have methodological errors that overstate the severity of the problem. From Pew Research, More Millennial households are…