John B. Case

Risk as measured by increased volatility increases slightly the probability of the investor losing money in the stock market. However, the probability of success increases dramatically due to the difference between a relatively unchanged stock intrinsic value and market price.

Crude oil up another 3.8% and back above $90 a barrel.

U.S. at the very top in terms of household ownership of equities

“We prefer the risk of lost opportunity to that of lost capital.” — Seth Klarman

Huge divergence in the Dow and Nasdaq this a.m. Nasdaq off 1.4%, Dow down just 0.1%

@GunjanJS It pays to have a diversified portfolio and not put all your eggs in the AI nest.

Today’s US PPI inflation data follows yesterday’s softer-than-expected CPI, which helped moderate market expectations for Fed rate hikes and provided a boost to stocks. Consistent with monthly readings of 0% for headline and 0.3% for core (down from 1.1% and 0.4%, respectively), these partial indicators of pipeline price pressures are expected by consensus to show the annual measure of headline PPI inflation moderating from 6.5% to 6.2%, while core is expected to increase from 4.9% to 5.1%. #economy #inflation #markets #PPI

@tomkeene We are ruled by idiots. I’m old enough to remember what a debacle this was in ‘74 because I was one of the kids standing in the dark waiting for the school bus.

@rcwhalen @TheHackersNews It's a little concerning. No scratch that. It's a lot concerning!

This should terrify everyone. "Your workforce is saving time by connecting AI agents to email, file shares, and business workflows…And most of the time, nobody in IT or security approved it." @TheHackersNews

Just like yesterday’s CPI, US PPI inflation came in significantly softer than consensus forecasts, across the board. Headline PPI moderated to 5.5% year-over-year, driven by a -0.3% monthly decline, while the core rate fell to 4.7% (on a 0.2% monthly increase). These much better-than-expected figures are set to boost equities and further temper market expectations for upcoming interest rate hikes. #economy #markets #ppi #inflation

@GunjanJS I think he should read the most recent edition of B. Graham's book The Intelligent Investor with commentary from renowned WSJ reporter J. Zweig. It should be read by all young investors.

@ScottNations Wouldn't $280 a barrel be the end of Western Civilization as we know it?

The $280 strike crude oil call options expiring in September are $0.01 bid.

@jodiecongirl Yes, just invest the money in a few super low-cost ETFs at Vanguard.

Very cool! A Plan to Stop Solar Storms From Sending Us Back to the Stone Age wsj.com/science/space-…

I woke up thinking about private equity. (Lol, yes sad & true!) Yesterday,I went to Dover Saddlery for the last time & paid pennies on the dollar as they’re liquidating. Thousands of employees losing jobs, mom & pop suppliers screwed, the small horse community devastated by the loss of this great business. I’d have rather paid full price & helped support a biz that I’ve loved since I was a kid. PE over leveraged, over expanded & to no end, but to try to juice a perfectly fine business into becoming a golden goose cash register & in doing so ruined it all. I know PE has destroyed veterinary practices too - not by bankruptcy, but by corrupting the integrity of the vets & many human health care biz’s as well. And soooo many other businesses & lives along the way. Many PE firms are decent, but soooo many are based pure unadulterated greed, with no care for societal value. And newsflash, what’s bad for society is usually bad for business. (Pls don’t argue w me abt the economics of drug dealing) It goes back to my frustration with greed. There’s plenty of $$$ to be made. Excessive greed ruins everything. And people blame capitalism, which is ridiculous- clearly communist Russia & China have no lack of greed. It’s not the economic system. Just the downside of human nature. Thx for letting me rant.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb walked into Google and explained what Antifragility is and how the world actually works: 1. The opposite of fragile is not robust. That is the first mistake almost everyone makes. Robust means something does not care about volatility. The true opposite of fragile is something that actually benefits from disorder, volatility, and stress. He calls it antifragile. 2. If you are shipping something fragile you write handle with care on the box. The true opposite of that package would have please mishandle written on it. Something antifragile wants to be mishandled. It gets stronger from it. 3. Fragility is always about nonlinear harm. Jumping ten meters kills you. Jumping ten centimeters a hundred times does not. The harm accelerates disproportionately with size. That acceleration is the mathematical signature of fragility and it can be measured precisely. 4. Anything that has survived long enough to exist today must have this property. If harm were linear you would be destroyed just walking to the office. Everything that persists is built so that small stressors barely touch it but large unexpected shocks destroy it. 5. Large size creates fragility automatically. A hundred million pound project in the UK had thirty percent more cost overruns than a five million pound project doing the same thing. The bigger the stone the more the harm. Size and fragility are inseparable. 6. Governments and institutions make the same mistake constantly. They chase perfect stability and call it good management. But something organic requires variability to survive. Greenspan tried to eliminate all economic volatility. He called it the Great Moderation. What he actually did was allow hidden risk to accumulate invisibly until it exploded all at once. 7. Small forest fires clean out flammable material and prevent catastrophic ones. By eliminating small fires you guarantee a massive one eventually. The same principle applies to economies, banks, and any complex system. Suppressing volatility does not remove risk. It stores it. 8. The only way to make something genuinely robust is to embrace bipolar strategies rather than medium ones. Eighty percent of your portfolio in something safe and twenty percent in something highly speculative is more robust than putting everything in medium risk. The average of extremes beats the mediocre middle. 9. Everything organic communicates with its environment through stressors. Your body needs the gym. Your bones need stress. Your immune system needs exposure. Depriving any living system of the stressors it needs does not protect it. It weakens it invisibly. 10. What does not kill me makes others stronger is closer to the truth than what does not kill me makes me stronger. When a system gets stronger under stress it is usually because the weaker components were destroyed, not because the survivors individually improved. The system improves through the death of its fragile parts. 11. Trial and error is not the opposite of knowledge. It is a form of knowledge with a convex payoff. You lose little when you are wrong and gain enormously when you are right. That asymmetry is what makes tinkering more powerful than theoretical planning in unpredictable environments. 12. Most of what we attribute to theoretical knowledge actually came from tinkering that was dressed up afterward as having been scientifically planned. The Romans built extraordinary things for centuries without ever having heard of Euclidean geometry. Technology routinely precedes the science that supposedly explains it. 13. The fragilista is Taleb's name for the person who denies antifragility and causes damage through that denial. Bureaucrats, central planners, academics, and policy makers who overstabilize systems from the top down are fragilistas. They remove the volatility that systems need and call it improvement. 14. Seneca, the wealthiest man in the ancient world, trained himself every day to wake up as if he had lost everything. He would deliberately live as if he were on a shipwreck to ensure he always had more upside than downside. Having more to gain than to lose from random events is the definition of antifragility in personal life. 15. In medicine, convexity matters more than people realize. If you are very ill the potential benefit of treatment vastly outweighs the risk, so you should see ten doctors not one. If you are mildly ill the risks of intervention almost certainly outweigh the modest benefits. The problem is that mildly ill patients are five times more numerous than severely ill ones, which is exactly who pharmaceutical companies focus on. 16. Removing something unnatural from your life has almost no side effects. Adding something artificial always has multiplicative hidden effects. In complex systems less is almost always more. The via negativa, improving by subtraction rather than addition, is consistently underestimated. 17. The real ethical crisis of modern times is that the people making decisions do not bear the consequences of those decisions. Bankers take the upside. Society takes the downside. Economists give broken advice and face no consequences when it fails. Nothing improves in any field where the people who are wrong are not harmed by being wrong. 18. Time is the ultimate detector of fragility. Whatever is fragile will eventually be broken by time. Whatever has survived for a long time has demonstrated antifragility and will likely survive longer still. A book that has been read for three thousand years will probably be read for three thousand more. A technology that is forty years old has at least forty more years ahead of it. 19. The only way to know you are alive and not a machine is that you benefit from variability. If you like variation and gain from disorder you are antifragile. If you require peace and predictability to function you are fragile. It is as simple and as profound as that. Before you go, can we stay in touch? I'd love to share one email with you every Sunday that'll challenge how you think about business, money and freedom. Stay in touch here: bradkellard.com/newsletter

Warren Buffett: “If you can detach yourself, temperamentally, from the crowd, you'll get very rich. You don't have to be very bright [either].” “It doesn't take brains. It takes temperament.”

Warren Buffett: "I watch everything — [like rail car-loadings] — but I don't do it to make specific investment decisions. I enjoy it. I want to know what's going on." "But I don't think I can make money by predicting what's gonna go on next week or next month. I do think I can make money by predicting what's gonna happen in ten years." (CNBC || 2020)

The solution is to go back to Versailles since he likes how it is decorated and he can sign another MOU.