Numbers

I Fought The Deficit and The Deficit Won.

November 16, 2010

There’s a really interesting, fun and somewhat deceptive tool at the NYTimes [deficit tool] which allows you to toy with various proposals in order to cut the deficit and in real time, you can see how you did.  As you can see, the tool starts off with the present assumptions and lets you cut from […]

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Black Swan Investing – Making a Fortune off Rare Events

October 31, 2010

For the uninitiated, a Black Swan event as outlined in Nassin Taleb’s excellent book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is one in which it is so rare and unpredictable that virtually nobody is prepared for it.  Consider a small handful of 5 hedge funds that stood out as amongst millions of […]

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Hindenburg Omen – Don’t Believe the Hype

August 15, 2010

The Hindenburg Omen is upon us.  What is this dreaded scourge you ask?  Well, it’s supposedly the equivalent of financial Armageddon reigning down upon us mere mortals.  An otherwise obscure blind mathematician by the name of Jim Miekka has postulated that when several sets of financial factors and ratios all align negatively, that is the […]

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My Tool to Pick Between 2 Very Tough Choices (Yes, I’m a Nerd)

July 29, 2010

My wife and I have been mulling over a move for some time now and we’ve finally reached the point where we put our house up for sale and we’re looking at homes in another area.  The primary driver is to move to a better school district (public school, not private school), but there are […]

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Should I Refinance? How Much Lower Should Your Rate be to Make Sense?

June 24, 2010

Should I Refinance? That’s a common question that is often answered a little too brazenly by rules of thumb that don’t necessarily make a lot of sense.  It’s kind of like saying “You should buy and house and not rent” or “you should own stocks and not bonds”.  It kind of depends on your personal […]

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