Deep Dish

All Life is an Experiment

predictions

is crypto bullshit? calling my shots cover image

Is Crypto Bullshit? Calling My Shots

August 31, 2022 | Richard Meadows

The harshest critics and strident boosters of crypto-land are engaged in an ever-escalating contest to see who can project the most lurid vision of the future. Nothing in this arena can be taken at face value, which makes it unusually fertile ground for battle-testing your own critical thinking skills.

My adventures down the rabbithole have given me a lot of ideas for blog posts, but experience suggests I won’t get round to publishing most of them.

Instead, I want to call my shots right now:

Kindly Stop Saying The Efficient Market Hypothesis is Dead

May 14, 2020 | Richard Meadows

There are whispers that the Efficient-Market Hypothesis (EMH) is dead.

Smart people say the EMH may have been the real victim of the coronavirus. These people, or their friends, were able to get ahead of the recent market crash. They sold stocks before the market reacted, or shorted them, or bought ‘put’ options, and made handsome profits.

They beat the market without having any special information! They were reading the same news and reports as everyone else. They made a profit by acting on public information that was right there for anyone to see. And so, the EMH is dead, or dying, or at the very least, has a very nasty cough.

I say this is wishful thinking: rumours of the death of efficient markets are greatly exaggerated.

how to profit from coronavirus: investing through the pandemic

How to Profit From Coronavirus

March 24, 2020 | Richard Meadows

There are a couple of cheap/free options you can to take out to limit the near-bottomless downside risk of COVID-19. I mentioned them in the last post, but they’re time-sensitive; hopefully you took those steps before the panic-buying began.

Now it’s time to think about the upside. When a black swan flaps its wings, great risks and opportunities swirl out of the same chaos.

So: what would it take to not just weather this situation, but profit from it?

the art and science of mental time-travel: cover image

Time Travel for Pleasure and Profit

Last updated: November 20, 2020 | Published on January 29, 2020 | Richard Meadows

Our meatsack bodies slavishly plod along at the precise rate of one second per second. But our minds are unbounded by the constraints of time or space, free to wander the past at will, and poke into the distant corners of the future.

The ability to create vast, hyper-detailed simulations of the past and future is the closest thing we have to a superpower, because it lets us do the following…

stockmarket charts: how safe are index funds, anyway?

Beware of Geeks Bearing Formulas

Last updated: July 3, 2020 | Published on July 29, 2019 | Richard Meadows

The history of finance is a history of brains dashed on the pavement. The fact that many people tend to be ‘irrationally’ wary of the markets starts to take on a new significance: the suspicious folk-wisdom has often been correct, while the ‘experts’ have consistently been dangerously wrong.

Hence Warren Buffett’s warning: beware of geeks bearing formulas…

Goals Gone Wild

Last updated: November 20, 2020 | Published on January 12, 2019 | Richard Meadows

Every month, the blogging mafia convene: if you know what’s good for you, the first post of the year better have something to do with goals and resolutions, and at least one mention of the phrase ‘new year, new me’. I’m sorry! They’ll break my kneecaps if I don’t do what they say! My compromise is to write a post […]

Is the law of attraction real? cover image

Is The Law of Attraction Real?

Last updated: July 27, 2019 | Published on August 3, 2018 | Richard Meadows

Napoleon Hill was a pretty shitty human being, but you have to give him props for being perhaps the the greatest conman in history. It’s not just the sheer brazenness of the con, but that he got away with it scot-free, and continues to be revered long after his death. Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937, is still a bestseller today. It has 4.5 stars on Amazon.

None of the glowing reviewers seem to be aware that rather than soaking up the principles of the greats, curated and distilled over 20 years, they’re reading fiction cut from whole cloth by a conman whose only expertise lay in parting fools from their money.

As incredible as this is, it’s not the topic of this post. Ideas must be judged on their merits, and Think and Grow Rich is the perfect jumping-off point for exploring the positive thinking phenomenon.

Hill didn’t come up with the ‘Law of Attraction’ himself, but he perfected the archetypal self-help format: if you trace back the explosion in gurus waxing lyrical about the the power of belief, Think and Grow Rich is ground zero. Every purveyor of inspiration porn for the last 80 years—Tony Robbins, Oprah, Deepak Chopra, The Secret—has a direct lineage to this book.

It all starts with this idea: If you believe in yourself, the universe will provide. Conquer your thoughts, and you conquer the world…

Advanced Investing: The Barbell Strategy for Investing

Advanced Investing: The Barbell Strategy for Bastards

Last updated: November 20, 2020 | Published on November 30, 2017 | Richard Meadows

Marry an accountant, but have occasional flings with rock stars. Lift very heavy weights for a few repetitions, then do lots of low-impact cardio. Work a secure and boring job, while pursuing highly speculative ventures on the side.
The common thread running through all these ideas is called the ‘Barbell Strategy’, and it’s useful for all sorts of big decisions – from your career and work, to health and fitness, and of course, your investment portfolio…

The Worst Investment Ever: How I Lost $10,000 Catching a Falling Knife

The Worst Investment Ever: How I Lost $10,000 Catching a Falling Knife

Last updated: July 3, 2020 | Published on September 8, 2017 | Richard Meadows

It’s pretty embarrassing to air this story in public, but it’s for a good enough cause that I’ve decided to bite the bullet. Back in 2015, I was still picking individual stocks, and doing pretty well for myself. I probably thought I was hot shit. That is, before I made a series of really dumb mistakes which cost me US$10,000.

I would have reached my six figures savings goal much faster if I hadn’t screwed up, but I didn’t lose any sleep over the whole mess. In fact, I’m actually kind of glad it happened. I might be a slow learner, but hopefully you can wise up sooner than I did…

Use The Force to Win At Investing: Lessons From a Billionaire

How a Billionaire Taught Me to Invest Using the Force

Last updated: March 28, 2020 | Published on February 11, 2017 | Richard Meadows

Star Wars fans come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they look like scruffy, twenty-something writers from a small island on the arse-end of the world. Other times they look like besuited, seventy-year-old billionaire fund managers from the American mid-west. David Booth is co-founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors, which manages about $445 billion of investor cash. I didn’t get to ask him to weigh in on the Han vs Greedo controversy, but our conversation was still among the most life-changing I’ve ever had.