Recent content on My Ledger
The first time I learned this lesson, it was month-end close, late at night because I cannot finish the closing on time. I’m at my desk with last month’s closing accruals, I am tired, I roll the numbers forward, copy the same entry, and tuck it into this month’s closing journals and submit them for approval. The next morning, I get an email from my manager, rejecting the journals.
Somewhere today a person is filling in a form with a pen. On a scale of one to five, how would you feel if your portfolio fell twenty percent? Robert Hagstrom relays Pruitt’s observation that investors respond to markets the way Walter Mitty responded to life. In a rising market they answer as a fearless bomber pilot. In a falling one they answer as a henpecked husband. Same person, same…
Pharaoh dreamed of seven fat cattle grazing by the Nile and seven lean ones that rose out of the water and ate them. Seven plump ears of corn, swallowed by seven scraggly ones. Joseph read the dream as a schedule: seven years of plenty, then seven years of famine. He told Pharaoh to stockpile grain. When the famine arrived, the storehouses opened and buyers came from every country around Egypt.…
Peck is out in his yard repairing a lawn mower when a neighbour stops to watch and says: “I’ve never been able to fix those kind of things”. Peck responds and tells him that it’s because he doesn’t take the time. He doesn’t offer that as a joke about handiness, its diagnosis for root cause. The neighbour had converted a few seconds of unwillingness into a…
In 1943, the first American jet fighter took shape under a rented circus tent. The walls were Wright engine crates, salvaged from Hudson bomber deliveries and stacked because the wood was heavy and good. Twenty-three engineers, pulled one at a time from the main Lockheed plant by a man who wanted only people whose work he already knew. No committee sat between the design engineer and the mechanic.…
Spain says its border with Portugal runs 987 kilometers. Portugal puts the same border at 1,214. Neither government is lying, and neither made an arithmetic mistake. The British scientist Lewis Fry Richardson found this while chasing a different question. He wanted to know whether the length of a shared border predicted how often two nations went to war, so he collected the reported lengths. The…
In 1968, the board of the Penn Central railroad represented the apex of corporate prestige. The directors’ table was filled by bank chairmen, seasoned industrialists, and the heavyweights of American governance. For two years, they gathered in quiet, oak-paneled rooms to oversee what was then the largest corporation in the country. Out on the tracks, the physical business was breaking down.…
A man sits with his back to a billiard table. Behind him someone rolls a ball across the felt and lets it settle. He has to name where it stopped, and he will never be allowed to turn and look. His first guess is close to worthless, a point picked at random on a surface he cannot see. Then a second ball is rolled and he is told one thing: it came to rest to the left of the first, or to the right.…
At Cajamarca, in November 1532, one hundred sixty-eight Spanish soldiers captured the emperor of the Inca. Atahuallpa ruled the largest and richest state in the Americas and moved with an army of eighty thousand. Pizarro held him for eight months and set a price for his release: gold enough to fill a room twenty-two feet long and seventeen feet wide to a height above a standing man. The Inca paid…
Before dawn, Steven Pressfield climbs into a car he does not want to be in and drives to a gym he does not want to enter. He hates the hour. The workout will hurt, and he knows the ways a man can injure himself in a room full of iron. He goes anyway, cold and half-awake. None of this is about his body. Pressfield describes what the early gym session is actually for:
John Jantsch had a forty-minute interview he needed transcribed. He uploaded the audio to a service that runs on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The file was cut into fragments and handed to anonymous workers scattered across the world, each receiving a few seconds of speech they would never hear in full. Under three hours later the pieces were sewn back together and the finished transcript landed…
In Mayan mythology the universe was destroyed four times, and each time the survivors prepared for the wrong disaster. A flood came, so they climbed into the trees, built dikes, moved to higher ground. Then the world burned. The people who had armored themselves against water came down from the branches, fled the woods, and built houses of stone along a craggy fissure. Then the earth shook and the…
On October 12, 1307, Jacques de Molay walked at the head of a funeral procession in Paris. The Grand Master of the Knights Templar had been asked to serve as pallbearer for Catherine of Courtenay, sister-in-law to Philip IV of France, an honor reserved for nobles in favor at court. The king was there. So was every member of the royal family. The next morning, before dawn, bailiffs woke de Molay…
Dalio’s 1982 bet against the economy that nearly destroyed Bridgewater. In 1982 Ray Dalio was certain. He had run the numbers on what American banks had lent to emerging economies, decided the borrowers could never repay, and concluded that a debt crisis was coming. He testified before Congress. He went on television. When Mexico defaulted that August, the first half of his thesis held. Then…
The arithmetic behind the title: a human lifespan of eighty years is roughly four thousand weeks. Eighty years comes to roughly four thousand weeks. That is the arithmetic behind the title, and it lands harder than the productivity advice that usually fills the books shelved next to this one. Four thousand is not a large number. You can hold it in your head without strain. You can fit it into a…
Christopher Latham Sholes spent the early 1870s solving a problem that no longer exists. His typewriter jammed. When a typist struck two neighboring typebars in quick succession, the metal arms collided and stuck halfway to the page. The account usually given is that Sholes rearranged the letters to push common pairs apart and slow the rate of collision. Remington bought the design, pushed it into…
Joshua Bell stood in a Washington D.C. subway station and played the violin for forty-five minutes. Over a thousand people walked past him. He made thirty-two dollars. He was using a three-million-dollar Stradivarius. Two nights earlier, he played the exact same music on the same instrument to a sold-out concert hall. If people were just paying for the music, the setting wouldn’t matter. But…
Dick Stack closes his second store, refuses to declare bankruptcy, and sells his house and car to pay his creditors. In December 1957, Dick Stack ran newspaper ads offering a “$50,000 stock reduction” three weeks before Christmas. He had been a sporting goods retailer for less than a decade. He had opened a second store the year before, in a suburban strip center called Hillcrest,…
Nikolaos Passaris sent me the title and I almost dismissed it on sight. Richer, Wiser, Happier . It read like a self-help pamphlet stapled to a personal finance blog. I had been burned by enough books promising the full trifecta to feel justified in my skepticism. Anything advertising “richer” up front usually means the other two words are decoration. But Niko does not recommend…
There is a screenshot on my phone of a crypto position from late 2021. I have not deleted it. I keep it the way a climber keeps a photo of the route they fell on, not as a souvenir but as a piece of evidence I want to be able to revisit when I get confident again. When I picked up Edward Chancellor’s book, I expected a tour of historical disasters. I expected powdered wigs and tulip auctions…
The screenshots come in throughout the day. A green candle. A position up 23%. A short clip of a candlestick chart someone has annotated with red circles and an arrow pointing at the moon. April was the month hardware stocks led the recovery. People I have known for fifteen years, mostly accountants, none of them investors by training, sending screenshots of Micron, of AMD, of Vertiv. At home,…
Towards the end of the day, I have a habit I do not feel especially good about. I open my portfolio, tell myself I am only checking prices, and within minutes I am no longer checking anything. I am searching. One stock is down more than I expected. Another has drifted for weeks. A third is moving for reasons I cannot explain. So I start looking for something that will make the movement feel…
During a difficult period, my mom told me a story of a king who asks his advisors for a ring that will make a happy man sad and a sad man happy. They bring him a gold band with four words engraved inside: This too shall pass. That was the whole story. No explanation, no moral drawn out at the end. Just the request and the answer. It stayed with me longer than stories that tried harder. I think…
I struggle with the corporate obsession with “value.” You hear the variations constantly: add value, unlock value, provide value. The phrases feel empty to me. My struggle is not a lack of ambition, but a lack of mechanics. If you are evaluating a reporting architecture or designing an internal control framework, the mandate to “add value” offers no actual instruction. It…
The library at Alexandria didn’t die in a single fire. That’s the version most of us carry around, the dramatic one-act tragedy: the greatest collection of ancient knowledge, consumed in a single blaze of negligence or conquest. But the historical record is murkier. The library declined over centuries, through a succession of smaller destructions, political neglect, and the slow…
There is a line often attributed to Lenin: sometimes decades pass and nothing happens, and sometimes weeks pass and decades happen. I have been thinking about this all month — not as a historical observation but as a lived experience. War arrived in my region. The portfolio drew down nearly 16% from its peak. I found myself, one evening, toggling between a missile trajectory map and a brokerage…
In the summer of 1720, an English citizen holding government debt could walk into the offices of the South Sea Company and execute a simple exchange. They would hand over an illiquid state annuity and receive an equivalent market value of South Sea Company stock in return. On the surface, it looked like a routine upgrade in personal liquidity. The citizen was trading stagnant paper for a dynamic…
There are two ways to lose money in the stock market. The first is to be wrong. The second is to be right but not long enough. I’ve done both. The second one hurts more. I had done the work. Weeks of it. Financial statements, competitive analysis, management track record. The thesis was sound. I bought with conviction, the kind of conviction you feel in your chest. Then the stock dropped.…
Somewhere in the opening pages of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , a starship called the Heart of Gold is hurtling through space. Its passengers: an anxious Earthman named Arthur Dent, a two-headed ex-president of the galaxy, and a chronically depressed robot named Marvin, are strapped in and terrified. The ship lurches. Stars blur into streaks of light. Reality itself seems to hiccup.…
On a recent flight back to my home city, I played Battleship with Hamza. Two grids, hidden boats, and you take turns calling out coordinates. B4. Miss. D7. Hit. You drop bombs blindly onto a map, hoping to strike something before your opponent strikes you. Hamza celebrated every hit with the joy only a child can muster for destruction that isn’t real. Now debris is falling on the city I have…
Jay Gatsby stood at the edge of his dock, staring across the water at a green light. He had done everything right. He had accumulated wealth through means he never disclosed. He had purchased the mansion directly across the bay from Daisy Buchanan. He had thrown parties so lavish that strangers wandered in from the streets of West Egg, hoping that one night she might wander in too. He had…
The myth of Procrustes is a story about the arrogance of the host. He was a small-time king on the road to Athens who offered “hospitality” to travelers. He had a bed of iron. If you were too short for the bed, he would hammer your body and stretch your joints until you fit the frame. If you were too tall, he brought out a saw. He was obsessed with the symmetry of the fit. He never…
Imagine a chief in the Pacific Northwest; let’s call him the Big Man. For five years, he lives a life of grueling self-denial. He wakes before dawn to repair nets. He bullies his family to weave endless stacks of cedar-bark blankets. He forces his kin to press thousands of gallons of candlefish oil until their hands are stained and their backs break. He isn’t doing this because he is hungry.…
In 1636, a merchant in Amsterdam traded twelve acres of land for a single Semper Augustus tulip bulb. He was not a fool. He was a rational actor operating in a market that had lost its tether to reality. He didn’t buy the bulb to plant it; he bought it because he knew that in a week, a “greater fool” would pay him double. For months, this logic held. The price of tulips had…
In Homer’s Odyssey , Penelope is trapped. Her husband, Odysseus, has been missing for twenty years. Her palace in Ithaca is overrun by 108 suitors. They are loud, drunk, and aggressive. They slaughter her cattle and drink her wine, demanding she choose one of them to marry. Her dilemma is agonizing. She doesn’t know if Odysseus is alive or dead. If she chooses a suitor now, she betrays the…
In 1998, the stock market was in a state of euphoria. The Dot-com bubble was inflating, and everyone looked like a genius. But in Omaha, Warren Buffett was quietly dealing with a problem that could have ruined him. Berkshire Hathaway was trapped. After a decade of massive returns, Buffett’s portfolio was dangerously top-heavy. He was sitting on billions in unrealized gains, and his exposure to the…
I first noticed crypto the way most people do. Prices were moving. Headlines were getting louder. Everyone seemed to have an opinion. This was 2021. Bitcoin was climbing fast. I watched. I stayed out. I told myself I was being disciplined. Skeptical. Rational. Then, sometime in 2022, as prices pushed toward what was then the all-time high around $60,000, something shifted. The hesitation that had…
In retail, shrink is treated as a fact of life. Some inventory disappears. Some gets damaged. Some is miscounted. Most large chains plan for it the way they plan for bad weather. Usually somewhere between one and two percent of sales just vanishes each year.
Most people have been inside a house they don’t own but know intimately. You notice the creak in the hallway long before guests do. You know which window sticks in winter. You know where the light falls in the afternoon and which rooms cost more to heat than they should. Living in a place gives you a kind of knowledge that doesn’t show up on a floor plan. Buying a house with a mortgage is built on…
“A forest fire doesn’t start because lightning exists. It starts because the forest was already full of dry brush.” —David Dredge Lightning hits the ground thousands of times a day. Most strikes disappear into dirt. But one strike hitting a stretch of accumulated branches, leaves, and tinder becomes a catastrophe. The event is the same. The outcome depends entirely on where it hits. That idea…
Imagine you’re standing on a watchtower overlooking a vast, wintry landscape. Down below, the scene is a blizzard: swirling snow, howling winds, flashes of news headlines, blinking price tickers, anxious voices in every direction. From ground level, visibility is nearly zero. The snowstorm is all around you, demanding constant attention and filling you with the urge to react quickly. Every gust…
In 2005, Amazon puzzled most investors. Its strategy seemed to defy business logic. The company kept reinvesting its potential profits, driving down prices, and building expensive infrastructure. Wall Street analysts saw inefficiency and waste. They focused on metrics like operating margins, which remained stubbornly low. The stock price reflected this skepticism, having fallen nearly 80% from its…
I recently turned 40, and when my wife asked what I wanted for my birthday, I answered without hesitation: “A home library.” Not a trendy shelf for coffee table books, but the real thing: floor-to-ceiling shelves, rows upon rows, the kind of library that demands its own ladder. We live in a small apartment in downtown Dubai. Space is a luxury we don’t have. But my wife, never one to shrink from a…
20 April 2020, my Facebook and Twitter feeds lit up with screenshots and hot takes: oil had “gone below zero.” Threads asked where to click to get paid to buy crude. For a minute, it looked like a free lunch. It wasn’t. What actually printed negative was the expiring May WTI futures contract at Cushing, Oklahoma. That contract ties to physical delivery. If you hold it into expiry, you don’t “own…
Hibbing is cold and far. A mining town where winters press in and music travels by radio and records. Robert Zimmerman grew up there with a drum in one photo and a guitar by ten. By high school he was covering Elvis and Little Richard in small gyms and VFW halls. His yearbook guessed he’d join Little Richard. He didn’t. He went south to the University of Minnesota and stopped going to class.
In 1975, Walmart’s cash conversion cycle told a stark story: merchandise spent 95 days in the supply chain before generating cash. The physics of retail meant that for every dollar of sales, another dollar had to be tied up financing inventory’s journey through ports, warehouses, and backrooms. The working capital requirements were staggering. Today, that same supply chain had been…
In Sir Walter Scott’s “Tales of a Grandfather,” published in 1827, he recounts a legendary tale of perseverance that has inspired generations. As the story goes, in the winter of 1306, Robert the Bruce found himself in a small cave on the Isle of Arran, a defeated king watching his dreams of Scottish independence crumble. Six times he had led his armies against the English, and…
Language shapes thought. When Jim Collins began his research for Good to Great, he explicitly told his team to avoid focusing on leadership. He was skeptical of attributing too much success to individual leaders. After all, if a company succeeds, we call its leader great; if it fails, we say they weren’t. A circular logic that teaches us nothing. But his research team pushed back. They saw…
We all have a story we tell ourselves about how food reaches our table. A farmer harvests wheat under the sun. The grain travels to storage silos rising against the horizon. From there, it moves through processors and manufacturers, eventually landing on shelves at Carrefour or Spinneys as bread or pasta. A neat, linear journey from field to fork. I believed this story too, until I didn’t.…
“You need to stop defining yourself by your titles and degrees. Here, nobody cares about that. They care about who you are.” The words from my Toastmasters evaluator land with unexpected weight. Moments earlier, I had stood before the group, delivering what was supposed to be a speech about myself. Instead, I had retreated to the comfort of familiar credentials: Chartered Accountant,…