When the price of an asset takes a steep, sustained dive in the absence of an obvious financial explanation, doesn't that strongly suggest a bubble is being pricked?

Volatility is a bitch on the downside.

Are there any authors, blogs, sites which cultivate an optimistic libertarian outlook?  Or is that an oxymoron? It's not an oxymoron at all. Read books and essays by Jeffrey Tucker. He's one of the most positive, optimistic libertarian writers I know of. I don't think I've ever felt down or discour...

Great article, Kriegsspiel. The following passage seemed especially relevant to this thread: News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. This sets readers up to have a fatalistic outlook on the world. Compare this with our ancestral past, where you could act upon practically e...

Wouldn't regulating sugar run into opposition from the farm lobby that wants endless uses for corn-based products? But isn't the farm lobby (especially corn) heavily subsidized by the government in the first place? Corn products like high-fructose corn syrup and cattle feed would be much more expen...

Regardless of backtesting, one way of looking at the four-way split is as a max-drawdown-minimization strategy. It minimizes the worst-case drawdown from one of the four assets taking a nosedive. The minute you allocate more than 25% to any of the four assets, you are at risk of a larger drawdown if...

It would also seem that having an INTJ/INTP personality type makes it more likely that you would be interested in a topic like the PP. For what it's worth, the INTJ/INTP type is also heavily overrepresented on the Bogleheads forum. See the following thread: http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic...

I've taken the actual MBTI twice and one of those "online only" versions once. I got INTJ all three times; I was always close to borderline on the S/N scale, moderately Judger, heavily thinker, and all but off the charts on introversion (I also scored quite heavily on Social Introversion ...

Thanks for the example, rickb. Makes a lot more sense to me now.

I'm still not quite sure I understand how this works. Let's consider the simpler case of a mutual fund before we consider an ETF. If there is a net redemption of shares within the fund, I understand that the fund will typically have to sell some of the underlying asset in order to convert the redeem...

I watched a really interesting documentary on Netflix the other day about the drug DMT. The experiences described by the study participants were incredible.... The films title was DMT: The spirit molecule. I actually enjoyed the book (same title) a lot better. Goes into much more detail regarding t...

This sounds great until: 1) The government starts using the test against it's enemies: "Don't vote for Candidate X, he scored a 60% on the psychopathy test!" or worse -- "You're under infinite detainment for psychopathy positive. You can't be rehabilitated. No, this has nothing to do...

The root cause here is psychopathy, not necessarily general "mental illness." Most mentally ill people would never do what the gunman in Connecticut did. Only psychopathy--a complete lack of empathy for other human beings--enables that kind of random mass-murder. The problem is that psycho...

Here's a blog post that shows a lot of informative graphs and charts: http://philebersole.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/asian-americans-jews-and-ivy-league-admissions/ Looks like Jewish students are significantly more overrepresented at elite universities than Asian students are. So if Asian applicants a...

Coffee wrote:

dualstow wrote: Is this what they mean by closed-end fund?

Good one.

"Keister Gold... half price."

Sounds like a bum deal to me.

I'm sure the bid-ask spread fluctuates a certain amount from day to day, and even at different times throughout a given day. So the fact that nathanh's Vanguard prices were posted 2 days after Greg's Fidelity prices probably means the two aren't an apples-to-apples comparison. To really have a fair ...

For those of you who are contacted fairly often on LinkedIn by recruiters, are your profiles set to "public" so that anyone can search for you by skillset, location, etc. and see your full profile and resume?

Do any of you consider LinkedIn to be a valuable part of your professional life? Have any of you gotten interviews or job offers directly because of LinkedIn? (By that I mean interviews or job offers you're fairly certain you would not have gotten if you didn't have a LinkedIn account.) As for my ow...

Tuna is another biggie.  This is trickier since the damand for e.g. chuck light (since it has less mercury than the solid white stuff) has sored. Bottom line is that I don't think you need to avoid eating fish, but it can be tricky (especially if you live in NYC). A couple of months ago, Chris Kres...

I'm not questioning the heritability of IQ.  You are asserting that not only is IQ highly heritable (a fact few people would debate) but that it is unevenly distributed among the human population.  Namely, that people from East Asia have a higher rate of inherited high IQ than other populations.  I...

That article is about heritability of IQ, not heritability of math aptitude. RuralEngineer was asking about evidence in support of my previous remark, "Why is there such vociferous objection to the idea that intelligence and certain types of skills may be highly heritable?" My statement m...

Is there any real evidence to support a genetic answer?  Isn't it more likely that the differences are due to cultural or social reasons? Yes, various evidence is provided in this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ At this point most teachers have given up on critica...

That article doesn't do anything to explain Asian kids who grow up in an English-only environment. The exact same criticism popped into my head when I was reading the article. The article also doesn't mention how deaf Asian people perform against deaf non-Asian people mathematically. If the hypothe...

On the subject of bodybuilding, have any of you heard of the The Metabolic Diet or its earlier incarnation The Anabolic Diet ? It was developed by Canadian physician and champion powerlifter Mauro Di Pasquale . I skimmed one of Di Pasquale's books recently, and the basic idea of the Metabolic Diet i...

The problem with junk jewelry (silver or gold) is the ability to determine whether it is genuine, the purity, etc.  In a SHTF situation having something recognizable (i.e. junk silver coins), at least in the early stages, seems more practical. Do you really consider junk silver coins to be "re...

During conditions of war, I don't think that it's really that the government is generating amazing innovations, I think that the people who are placed in wartime conditions just tend to have a lot more urgency to everything that they do, including coming up with new technology, in part because it f...