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
I want to talk to you about a crazy experiment. Years ago, an Italian blogger-now-YTer started sharing all his “financial life” in the open, to everyone. I virtually met him because of this experiment, and then I physically met him and now we are friends. I call it a crazy Read more
Ever since I devoured “The Success Equation” on a sun-drenched beach in Malaysia, I’ve eagerly anticipated every new piece from Michael Mauboussin. There’s something about his work that push the intellect, perhaps tinged with the nostalgia of that Malaysian coastline. Michael’s latest release, “Probabilities and Payoffs” delves into the nuanced Read more
I wrote the below post more than 4 years ago. And it still feels super relevant. Ok, enough with the excuses. It is a busy period and it’s been two months at least I do not manage to stay healthy three days in a row. So I decided to do Read more
As someone who runs (hahaha) a podcast, I am in awe of how the guys behind the Rational Reminder continue to find interesting topics to review after more than 300 episodes. Someone said that personal finance was a solved problem—sure. Or maybe, even in this small niche, we also amuse Read more