Good reads from around the Web.
I am away for the Easter Weekend, so this is a truncated Weekend Reading. I’m writing on Friday morning. Most of the day hasn’t happened. Who knows what Saturday will bring!
However don’t be disheartened, because I’ve got one of the greatest anti-consumerism posts ever written to share.
Sadly, I didn’t write it – and it’s a couple of years old. But I doubt many of you have read it. (I only just stumbled across it via Mr Money Mustache).
So that’ll be coming up in just a second.
Wait! It’s worth it.
After that I’ll have the best of the week’s posts – where the week stopped on Thursday night. It’s a long weekend. I hope you enjoy a bit of reading. And maybe a bit of thinking, wherever your beliefs lie on the spectrum between Richard Dawkins and the new Pope Francis.
(Incidentally, I’d argue that the spectrum extends a lot further in either direction than those two gentlemen. Dawkins is clearly a spiritual man, if a disbeliever in the supernatural, and I bet you could have an interesting conversation about atheism with Pope Francis. There are plenty beyond these poles).
Post of the week: How to make trillions of dollars
Today’s tasty main course, from the mindfulness website Raptitude, is so good it really needs no introduction.
So I’ll just say I wish I’d written it.
Here’s an extract from How to Make a Trillion Dollars:
Even from a seemingly unempowered starting point — a budget apartment in some forgettable corner of a society that has been designed to make you sick and impotent — these traits will do more for you than any “Anti” stance you can think of.
Hating the system is a favorite American pastime. It feels good, is difficult to stop once you start, and gets you precisely nowhere, not unlike eating Doritos.
Go read the rest of it! It’s better than the extract, or rather the extract is better un-extracted.
I expect to hear more from this guy in the years to come.
This week on the blogs
Making good use of the things that we find…
Passive blogs and general reading
- Confessions of a passive investing parasite – Canadian Couch Potato
- How to raise kids on a retire-early budget – Mr Money Mustache
- Best and worst U.S. style indices – Rick Ferri
- Proud to be a jack of all trades – Pando Daily
Active investing
- Buffett in 1,000 words – The Aleph Blog
- The best stock picker I ever knew – Jeff Matthews
- Cyclical versus franchise businesses – Beyond Proxy
- A sweet spot for US markets – Musings on Markets
- Next PLC on buybacks (scroll down) (via iii) – RNS on Investegate
Product of the week: Sick of soaring energy bills? Small supplier first:utility offers the cheapest discounted online tariff – the iSave Dual Fuel v14 – according to The Telegraph.
A few of this week’s mainstream media articles
Note: Some links may be to Google search results – these enable you to click through to read the piece without you being a paid subscriber of the site.
Passive investing AND active investing
- How recessions impact stock returns – Swedroe/CBS
- What if the second biggest US pension fund goes passive? – Dealbook
- The US market: Slightly overvalued – Morningstar
- Why gold miners have lagged the gold price (so far?) – Morningstar
Other articles
- Could UK savers wake-up to a Cyprus-style raid? – Telegraph
- Do young adults stand a chance in this unequal world? – NY Times
- So much for peak oil (told you so!) – FT Alphaville
- Climate science: A sensitive matter – The Economist
Book of the week: How does investing – especially trading – affect our biochemistry? And how do our bodies affect that trading? I heard ex-Wall Street trader John Coates discuss his research at the London School of Economics. You can read all about it in The Hour Between Dog and Wolf
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