Distant Barking

Young UK people are being sold a lie that they need to be investing in stocks at 22. Stock portfolios are nearly useless to most people in their twenties because the amounts they can realistically invest are too small to matter. £100 a month in an ISA over 5 years grows to maybe £7,000 — not life-changing money, a few months of rent. What actually moves the needle in your twenties is increasing the salary the £100 came out of. Going from £30K to £60K in 5 years isn't unusual for somebody who deliberately invested in their skill set. That's an extra £18,000-£20,000 of after-tax income, every year, for the rest of your career. The maths is brutal: every hour you spend optimising a small investment portfolio is an hour you didn't spend learning the skill that would double your earning capacity. Stocks are a tool for the wealth you've already built. Skills are how you build the wealth in the first place. Most 22-year-olds reading personal finance Twitter would be much better off ignoring it entirely for 5 years and putting that focus into becoming worth 3x more in the labour market. Compound interest on a skill compounds harder than compound interest on £100 a month.

🚨 Breaking 🚨 ⚠️ The attacker behind the $11.58M Verus exploit has reportedly returned $8.6 million The exploiter kept around $2.8M as a bounty reward

The biggest cope in the world is downwardly mobile college grads convincing themselves that their college classmates who majored in something uncool like accounting “sold out” and are “evil.”

My roommate worked as a strip club bouncer, when he’d tell people they’d usually say something like “heh must be awesome to work with a bunch of babes!” and he’d just stare off in space like a WW1 vet remembering how it smelled when his unit got vaporized in an artillery barrage.

A lot of people’s concept of “Can I afford this?” is simply “Do I have the means to put this on a credit card or purchase it in cash?” Many people have lost the ability to budget over longer time horizons and say “This is not a sustainable financial habit for me”

With an IQ over 110 and an elementary understanding of game theory anyone can predict that eventually women oppressor civilizations will conquer women liberator civilizations.

I told a guy at a barbecue last weekend that I had been buying busted small-cap software stocks at 4x free cash flow, and he looked at me with the specific facial expression of a man who has just realized he is trapped in a conversation with someone who voluntarily reads 10-Ks on vacation. He asked, with great gentleness, if I had considered Nvidia. I said I had considered Nvidia in the way one considers jumping off a bridge: briefly, theoretically, and with a clear understanding of the outcome. I told him I owned a company that sells dental practice management software to 11,000 orthodontists and that the CEO, a 64-year-old man named Greg who has not updated his LinkedIn since 2017, was, in my professional opinion, the single greatest capital allocator alive in North America today, and that I would, if legally permitted, have Greg’s name tattooed on my forearm. He asked if Greg knew this. I said Greg did not know I existed, and that this was the foundation of our relationship and the source of its strength. He excused himself to go check on his children, who, I observed, were not present at the barbecue. I stood by the grill alone for the next 40 minutes, eating directly from a bag of buns, thinking about Greg, who at that exact moment was, somewhere in suburban Indianapolis, almost certainly buying back stock at prices that will, in 2031, be regarded as the single greatest gift any small-cap CEO has ever given his shareholders, and the host’s wife came over and asked, with palpable concern, if I needed a ride home, and I said no, I needed nothing, I had Greg, and Greg was enough, and I have not been invited back to that house, and I do not care, because Greg loves me even though Greg does not know I am alive, and the math, as it has always been in every great deep value trade in history, is the only thing in this country that has not lied to me.

If you're a boomer in your 60s and 70s and you own property and are well off but your children are struggling and can't even buy a home, what the hell are you doin? Your time is over. It's their time. Help them. Be a good parent, do whatever it is you need to do... sell the house if you need to, give them some kickbacks to help buy their first home, etc. Life is short. Be a good parent and don't squat on stuff that doesn't matter. Give them their time.