I try to be a good consumer. I do that by rewarding companies that I think are doing good work and penalizing those that aren’t. If a product line turns south, I switch to a competitor until things get better, or they don’t. You can’t afford to be sentimental if the system is going to work properly, I tell myself, because the market is expressly built to allocate the right amount of funds to the proper locations.

If you’re over 50 or under 40, I would bet you’ve probably never heard of a band named De La Soul. If you haven’t, that’s a shame, because they are excellent. I’d tell you to stream their music, but their best music isn’t on any streaming service. As a result, nobody knows who they are anymore; nobody is listening, and if nobody listens to the music, did it even happen?

Right now I’d like to talk about your contractor. The one that won’t call you back. The one that gave you a quote about the basement remodel or the kitchen tile one minute and then just disappeared into the ether the next. The guy with the accent and the funny hair and the Big Johnson t-shirt that you joked about with your spouse. The guy with the $250 boots and the $100k pickup with $20k worth of tools in the bed.

We’re all crazy. That’s more or less true, if by crazy we mean deviant—that is, degrees of deviation from an artificial norm. But so much money in the market is made based on predicting not what the market will do, but what normal people will do when the market does what it inevitably does. And so, following that logic, to get away from that ‘normal’ thinking would seem to be a path to financial success.

The reason we tell a story isn’t to communicate information. The reason we tell a story is to communicate the truth. Or rather, the truth as we see it.

We believe something is true, and so we deliver information in such a way that conveys our belief about the meaning of that information. I would even argue that the preconceptions we use to gather the information could be understood as a story. We are meaning-making animals, which is another way of saying that we are story-telling animals.

I heard something the other day about Elon Musk sleeping on the floor of his factory and how that behavior, so typical of start-up founders, is evidence of a classic A-type personality.

I hate that stuff.

I don’t hate that Musk sleeps on the floor of the factory. God knows why he does that. Does he have to? Does it lead to better results? Maybe so, maybe not. Either way, Elon Musk is a unique personality, and to slap an artificial label on his behavior is just lazy.

Why do people get into the market?

By that I mean: what is driving people to do this with their money over something else? What drives people to invest their money over using it to buy a boat, go to Paris, finish the basement, build a stone patio to enclose the outdoor grill/fridge/sink combo? We could spend real money to do a thousand things but, for whatever reason, we don't. Instead, we think investing is smart. Prices rise. Valuations increase. It seems as though the benefits of investing are objectively obvious but, for those of us who haven't yet been to Paris, I think a very different process is at work.

I was in line for coffee the other day and saw a buddy of mine who does stand-up comedy. We got on the topic of political correctness, which, I told him in my scolding school-marm voice, “is destroying comedy.” At that point another guy in line turned around, looked at both of us and said, in deep seriousness, “But it is.”

The recent wild market fluctuations suggest that we've entered an interesting period where we can't decide what, exactly, money is, or even what it does. There's something about the nature of money that's unsettling for people. It's strange, occult, even a little mystical, because money requires something close to alchemy for it to work.

You might not have known that the original title of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street was Greed. That title is a little too on the nose, however, especially given the film’s most memorable scene, where Gordon Gekko stalks up and down the aisles of a convention hall with a microphone in hand to explain to the assembled how “greed...is good.”

By 1993, I had listened to Metallica’s self-titled “Black” album enough to warp the tape, and I had just decided that Master of Puppets was the greatest album ever recorded by man, save for Led Zeppelin IV, which was I understood as objectively great, but remained mysterious to me in a way that I somehow chalked up to “Britishness.”

There's a classic scene in Scorcese's film Gangs of New York, when Bill the Butcher wakes up the young Amsterdam to thank him for saving Bill's life the night before. Bill sits in a rocking chair, shirtless and wrapped in the American flag. As he reflects on his own mortality, he remembers an epic battle he had as a young man with a character known as The Priest. Beaten to a pulp by the Priest, Bill says that he couldn't bring himself to look his rival in the eye. "This was a great man," Bill insists.

Front-running. Pump-and-dump.

If you have never heard these investing terms, that makes perfect sense, because you are not a licensed investment advisor. As an advisor, we have regulations and compliance set by FINRA, the SEC, state securities regulators, and our Broker/Dealer, SagePoint Financial. All of our personal investment accounts are monitored to ensure we are not engaging in any financial shenanigans. This is all CYA for you, the client, and us, as a business. Compliance can be tedious, and yet is an absolute necessity in our industry like ours.

The pandemic is officially a year old, and everyone that I have spoken to has had a different experience. We will all remember this year forever, but the virus has impacted people differently. Some have lost loved ones and businesses, stamping 2020 as the most difficult year of their lives. Others don’t know anyone who has been sick, and their businesses are thriving. As I’ve said to some of you already, this pandemic is discriminatory.

A place I used to work just shut down. I used to teach there, and I was proud to do it. It was a venerated institution packed with award-winning faculty who were at the top of their respective fields, and the students were intense, conscientious, and eager to contribute to the world. It was an art school in San Francisco. It taught people how to draw and paint and sculpt, but most importantly it taught--it tried to teach--people how to think like artists.