I thought it might be useful to look at another great American enterprise that everyone knows, that has been part of many investor’s portfolio for decades, and is often ignored: The Hershey Company.
Several of the mail bag questions I’ve been getting ask for specific examples of how to look at the world, including the news, through a rational mental model approach. A perfect illustration fell into my lap today so I’m going to group these responses, write this post, and then reply to all of those who…
If you are comparing yourself to other people all the time, you’re wasting your mental energy and your emotional reserves. Josh, I read the site and it both encourages and discourages me. You expect us to achieve so much. Don’t you understand that not all of us are you? How are we supposed to do…
After working through several types of bread recipes, I am going to share with you one of the more popular, easier dinner breads we’ve made. It comes from an adaptation of a famous no-knead recipe published in The New York Times. In our tests, it performed very well and requires almost no effort, a handful of ingredients, and can serve as a very easy introduction if you’ve never baked a loaf of bread in your life. It should not be intimidating for you, even if you haven’t turned on an oven in years.
Update: This post originally covered a 25-year investment case study of General Mills. Since I am publishing it a few days into the new year, we can look at an additional year of data (all of fiscal 2012) so I modified the figures and compound annual growth rates to account for that extra year, stretching…
This is a mail bag question about the process I use to organize my kitchen and other things in general. Joshua, I love the food posts! I don’t understand how you experiment and find new recipes. What is your process? Tracy V. Like most things in my life, I build a system, adhere to it,…
There seems to be a misconception that ragtime music died along with the western saloons and brothels in which it reached its fruition. That isn’t true. If you grew up playing Nintendo, you may not even realize that you are a huge ragtime fan. You know dozens of ragtime hits and hearing them will probably…
Patti Page just died. If you are a member of my generation or younger, the odds are overwhelming that you have no idea who Patti Page was. In the 1950’s, she was the third best selling artist of the decade and had lifetime album sales exceeding 100,000,000 records. Given the lower population base back then, and the limited distribution channels, she was a far bigger cultural force in her generation than someone like, say, Beyoncé Knowles or Kayne West is today. Her song, “Tennessee Waltz” was the third best selling song of all time. Very few people I know even recognize the song today, let alone could sing it.
I’m reading a book called Spice: The History of a Temptation by Jack Turner. As the review said, “There was a time, for a handful of peppercorns, you could have someone killed. Throw in a nutmeg or two, you could probably watch. There was a time when grown men sat around and thought of nothing but black…
A few hours ago, I finished writing a piece about global investing through a Roth IRA, which was published to the About.com network. It got into some of the complexities of foreign investing, including the differences between share classes domiciled in various markets and currency translations. As I was thinking about whether there was anything…