Addressing the Most Common Half-Truth Circulated about the Buddha’s Ministry Buddhism = Pessimism? If you ask the average person to name one thing they know about Buddhism, one of the two or three things they are likely to choose among is “Life is suffering. Buddhism is high-class pessimism.” This sort of oversimplification that…

Investing in Economics vs Investing in Markets — Some years ago, Warren Buffett said in an interview that he hopes the stocks he owns go down, so that he can buy more. My initial reaction was surely this time he is just being provocative. But actually what he said makes perfect sense. There are two fundamentally divorced aspects…

How a company (or person) logs income can be as important as the amount of income itself There is a curiosity about standard accounting practice that perfectly reflects a standard practice about life. This is that systems are assessed with the assumption that they will go on forever. This is…

Why Not To Buy Stocks Like Shoes — In economic terms, the reason the stock market differs from the racetrack is that the amount of value the entities underlying it (e.g. stocks) stand to deliver is not fixed. As long as a business continues to operate, it will continue to create wealth. Of course, this is expected and…

The ‘Dharma Wheel’ and the Importance of ‘The Time’ — Buddhism is a methodology, like ‘medicine’, not a prescription, like penicillin, much less a dogma, like “always administer penicillin when a bacterial infection is detected”. The consequence of this is that the right thing at the wrong time or the wrong place is the wrong thing. This concept is extremely…

Clearing up Substance and Semantics — The distinction of investing from gambling, or what exactly it is that distinguishes market participants from horse betters, is frequently confused in both political/ethical and purely economic terms. Investing is different from gambling because it is not zero-sum; wealth can actually be created or destroyed (there is a lot more…

If Hippocrates was a Money Man instead of a Medicine Man “Rule #1: Don’t lose money. Rule #2: Remember rule #1.” — Christopher Browne, Parter at the legendary Tweedy, Browne fund There are only a handful of paramount investing principles, beyond which virtually everything else is commentary or a fine…

Everything Becomes Liquid if the Price is Low Enough — There are a number of nominally simple financial concepts which are the source of endless confusion, sometimes positively nourished by the community of financial advisors and commentators, and perhaps none so egregious as ‘liquidity’. The concept of liquidity is simple enough to understand: the invention of “capital” around the dawn…