My dad likes building stuff. It’s actually one of the coolest things about him. Whereas I design things on paper, then work with people to bring it into reality, he pictures it and then does it himself. Since I was a kid, my dad has wanted to restore an old Ford pickup truck. He…
Shortly after World War I, Raymond Poincaré, the Prime Minister of France, decided against partnering with Royal Dutch Shell to fund the energy needs of the French people. One of his military commanders, Colonel Ernest Mercier, worked with 90 banks and businesses to establish a new oil company called French Petroleum Company (er, technically, Française des Pétroles Compagnie since they weren’t speaking English). The name might sound prosaic but keep in mind this was the era of “General Electric” and “Standard Oil”. The new undertaking began operations on March 28th, 1924. Today, that business is known as Total, S.A. and it is one of the six supermajor oil powers on the planet.
Last night, we were in a hurry; were sponsoring a movie night and didn’t have much time to get dinner and dessert together. There would be no perfectly molded honey lemon bee hive cakes or unique custom icing crafted. Instead there would be delicious nachos and some sort of after dinner sweet. Whatever we did…
The great thing about making decisions in life through the lens of decision trees and opportunity cost is that it allows you to focus on what you actually want. You tend to protect yourself against giving up what you really want for what you want right now. Everything in life has an opportunity cost. It doesn’t…
Towards the back of the most recent General Electric annual report is an interesting graph. It shows what an investor would have experienced by putting $100 into three different investments: GE shares, the S&P 500, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It assumes that dividends were reinvested in each respective investment when they were distributed. How were you rewarded for six years of patient investing, assuming you added no fresh cash outside of the dividend reinvestment? Take a look.
I am going to give you a brief economics lesson in a few short minutes. Economists like to make things hard but for those of you wanting to know why Greece, and the Euro, continues to be such a problem for the world, here is a breakdown. It isn’t nearly as difficult as you might…
On this site, we talk a lot about how to play offense in the game of building wealth – investing in assets that generate cash, increasing your skill set so you can charge a higher price for your time, starting or acquiring businesses that throw off profits – but today I want to talk about an…
The world is full of hard businesses like steel mills. As a general rule, it is best to avoid them if you want to make a lot of money given that they tend to involve more risk due to lower returns on capital, weaker balance sheets, higher indebtedness, and a host of other factors.
Shortly after high school and during college, I found myself having to travel often. A family member who had experienced almost every airline, large and small, traveling as part of a successful medical career, recommended a small regional carrier called Midwest Airlines. Not only did they offer fewer passengers per flight by having two leather…
I have been hearing a lot of grumbling lately from friends and fellow gamers about the cost of video games. The economist in me cringes when an otherwise rational person jumps into a diatribe on the state of video game pricing and the various console wars because it reminds me of those people who insist that gas is at an all-time high, even when the inflation-adjusted cost of traveling one mile is less than it was in the 1950s. Listening to it makes me realize how thoroughly our education system has failed at producing rational, informed citizens capable of competing in the information age where knowledge is power.