When I first saw Nick Maggiulli’s post titled “You Cannot Put a Price on Mental Freedom”, I assumed he was talking about FIRE. You know, the dream of waking up on a Tuesday and deciding to go for a long walk, read a book, or do absolutely nothing. The kind Read more
Most people invest the bulk of their money later in life, when they’re earning enough to put serious cash away. But that creates a big problem: your retirement outcome ends up hinging on market performance in just a narrow window—basically, when you’re in your 50s and 60s. This is one Read more
I first read Flash Boys by Michael Lewis on warm summer evenings by Lake Geneva, back when I was single, kid-free, and had the time to think deeply about things like latency arbitrage and fragmented liquidity. Simpler times. I remember being fascinated by the rise of high-frequency traders (HFTs). They Read more
I was going through some old posts and realized something surprising: I’ve never written a dedicated piece on risk parity. I could’ve sworn I covered it at some point—maybe under the All Weather umbrella—but apparently not. Chalk it up to the hazards of writing too much (or having a bad Read more
Dear non-Italian reader,Nothing for you here today.I couldn’t drum up anything interesting this week—not even something I’d pretend to care about. So I dipped into the grab bag of local nonsense.It’s an Italian thing. Some culty personal finance stuff.Count yourself lucky.This strain of magical thinking seems safely quarantined to that Read more
A few days ago, I saw this tweet: I couldn’t picture in my mind what the purpose was and simply filed it away as “another meme ETF”. Then Katie Greifeld mentioned it in her podcast with Matt Levine, Money Stuff, saying that Rob Arnott was doing the same trade and Read more
I’ve been incorporating ‘Tail Risk’ ETFs into my portfolios for some time now, specifically TAIL in the Model Portfolio and TAIL, CAOS, and BTAL in my personal portfolio. Given the current market conditions, it feels like an opportune moment—or perhaps the worst time, if you haven’t already invested—to provide a Read more
In April 2022, I introduced on this blog The Italian Leather Sofa Model Portfolio. As a reminder, here is the portfolio composition: The idea behind the portfolio is stolen from here. The link offers the best explanation to what I think is the most common question related to it, i.e. why Read more
Man AHL dropped a new paper on regime-based investing (link). Think of it as the overachiever’s version of lazy portfolios. Instead of building a portfolio that’s resilient across economic regimes—like the Permanent Portfolio—this approach tries to front-run reality. If we’re in stagflation, why hold anything but cash? Or managed futures, Read more
The CFA Institute produced a detailed report on the historical performance of the 60/40 portfolio (here the link). While the breadth of this study is not as ample as other works, think of the UBS Yearbook, I found some interesting graphs…and the hook to write about potential issues in using Read more