Author: Jim Wang

I have a lot of books on my reading list. Actually, more accurately, I have a lot of books sitting on my desk that the optimistic version of me says he will read. 🙂

Well that’s apparently a thing.

Tsundoku: The art of buying books and never reading them [BBC] – “Do you have a habit of picking up books that you never quite get around to reading? If this sounds like you, you might be unwittingly engaging in tsundoku – a Japanese term used to describe a person who owns a lot of unread literature.” Of course there is a Japanese term for this and of course it describes me.

I bet you didn’t think I could find a book heist! You are wrong! A heist of books!

Tome raiders: solving the great book heist [The Guardian] – “According to Ellis, book theft has undergone an evolution over the past 10 to 15 years. “Prior to that, the theft of manuscripts and rare books was unusual, and quite often committed by people who had access,” he says, such as librarians and academics. But every new high-profile heist raises awareness of the fact that rare books are valuable enough to be worth stealing. At some point, “People realised that these were a comparatively soft target,” Ellis says. And it was only a matter of time before organised criminals spotted an opportunity.”

The cost of retiring early: a lost career of wages [His Her Money Guide] – “Everyone always talks about the positives of early retirement. Extra time and freedom of choice with what to do with it are usually the big headline items. I know that’s why we’re fundamentally on board with the concept of early retirement! But I had a bit of a funny thought about early retirement recently: by retiring early, how much money are we missing out on?”

You may have heard that Tesla joined the S&P 500 this week – you’ve probably also heard that Tesla’s stock price has been on a great run this year.

Depending on who you talk to, they may have suggested you buy some yourself… is that good or bad advice? 🙂

Here’s a good list of well-intentioned advice that you should take with a hefty grain of salt:

Bad Investing Advice: What to ignore [and why] [Women Who Money] – “No matter the recommendation or where it comes from, it’s wise to do your homework. Then you can determine the right investment approach for you.”

This next interview with Marc Andreessen is good on a number of levels (including the part about process and “resulting”):

Marc Andreessen On Productivity, Scheduling, Reading Habits, Work, and More [Andreessen Horowitz] – “What I’ve discovered is the number of people who can write something in the middle zone — when they’re trying to explain something that happened last week, month, a year or even a decade — and who I trust to actually give me an objective read on the situation is just a really, really short list. There’s a handful but there aren’t very many.We have one situation currently — what’s literally happening right now [with COVID-19]. Coronavirus is one where everyday I’m looking at all the science and all the economics because these are critical issues. And I’m trying to avoid all the commentary and all of the interpretation. And then the other, as you said, there’s just a very large amount of timeless stuff that really has been proven right over time. You could spend your entire life only reading timeless works which is what smart people used to do.”

The Power of a Part Time Job Even If You Don’t Need Extra Cash [MoneyNing] – “My friend needed quite a few articles before he is launching his site, so it’s so far been a “write as many as you want” type of arrangement. In other words, it’s “eat what you kill and the whole forest is open to you and you only”. This also means that I can directly put a dollar amount to the work I’m putting in for my friend. I honestly haven’t felt this excited about writing an article in a long time. Feeling greedy? Just go write an article. Feeling nervous about the market ups and downs? Write another one. See someone on the street and you felt really bad for him? Go give him some cash and some love, and then go back home to write one more piece.”

This first one isn’t about money directly but has huge implications on our economy and our lives:

A Call For Help [No Mercy/No Malice] – “For almost a year now, we have been retreating. The enemy has exposed our institutions as weak and ineffective, and preyed on a deadly comorbidity: the notion that individual liberty trumps collective sacrifice. The virus has driven us not to a beach, but into our own homes and, more dangerously, into separate spheres of differing truths. The daily death toll has crossed 3,000, hospitals are reaching capacity, and more than one million people contract the virus every week. By late January 2021, the virus will have killed more Americans than died fighting in World War II.”

Larry David and the Game Theory of Anonymous Donations [Nautilus] – “In a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode from 2007, Larry David and his wife Cheryl and their friends attend a ceremony to celebrate his public donation to the National Resources Defense Council, a non-profit environmental advocacy group. Little does he know that the actor Ted Danson, his arch-frenemy, also donated money, but anonymously. “Now it looks like I just did mine for the credit as opposed to Mr. Wonderful Anonymous,” David tells Cheryl. David feels upstaged, as if his public donation has been transformed from a generous gesture to an egotistical one.”

MacKenzie Scott, the Amazon billionaire, is giving away $1 billion a month to charity [Vox] – “One of the wealthiest people in the world, MacKenzie Scott, has spent the end of 2020 giving away about $1 billion a month, a staggering amount that sets a high mark for tech billionaires in terms of speed.”

While everyone wants the stock market to go up, short sellers want some part of it to go down. And, for the most part, they get a bad rap.

These days, short sellers are far more savvy. They don’t hope that a company is overpriced, they look for the ones they know are overpriced. They look for companies where there appears to be some shadiness (or just a little creative accounting) that may be inflating a stock’s price.

When they find it, they pounce… and then tell the whole world about it so the drop happens fasters.

What a world. 🙂

Would You Pay a 22-Year-Old Stanford Grad to Expose Wrongdoing? [Institutional Investor] – “At an age [22] when his peers are still learning the ropes, Dorsey is putting out a successful newsletter about a sector of investing that doesn’t get the sustained coverage it arguably should: activist short-selling, betting against a company’s stock while alleging fraud or other problems.”

How to Buy Gifts That People Actually Want [Will Patrick] – “Every year, we buy more bad gifts than we realise and nobody tells us about it. Here’s how to avoid the most common pitfalls and to use psychology to drastically improve your gift-giving game.”

Start Meeting Your Money Goals with a Yearly Budget Plan [Cash for Tacos] – “When people think of budgeting, they typically think of a monthly budget. And while the monthly budget is a useful tool for many, over the years I realized there was something missing from it. I kept finding myself overspending each month and therefore I wasn’t able to meet my savings goals. Saving money was an afterthought and unplanned expenses kept popping up. What I finally realized is that my monthly budget missed the big picture. It focused only on a single month, which often forgets those pesky non-monthly expenses and long-term money goals. And that is when I developed my own yearly budget.”

Country Boy [Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain] – “I will tell you from numerous visits — when you are sitting at the sushi bar at Masa, eating the most insanely high test rice and fish in the world, prepared by the man himself, you can be assured that though someone somewhere on the planet might just possibly be eating as well as you — NO ONE is eating better.”

Have a great weekend!

Technology has improved our lives but also introduces new ways to defraud people.

The Imposter [Toronto Life] – “Shaun MacDonald was an ambitious tech innovator whose start-up was going to revolutionize the crypto economy. His wealthy investors had no idea that their charismatic founder was really Boaz Manor, a notorious Canadian white-collar criminal. It was only a matter of time before they discovered the truth.”

How a flu virus shut down the US economy in 1872 – by infecting horses [The Conversation] – “In 1872 the U.S. economy was growing as the young nation industrialized and expanded westward. Then in the autumn, a sudden shock paralyzed social and economic life. It was an energy crisis of sorts, but not a shortage of fossil fuels. Rather, the cause was a virus that spread among horses and mules from Canada to Central America.”

An Elderly Mathematician Hacked the Lottery for $26 Million [Entrepreneur’s Handbook] – “Each week his bets soared higher and higher. Some weeks, he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. The game required you buy the tickets in person. So when a rolldown was coming, he and his wife split up into two cars and hit countless convenience stores across the state. The government, with its usual iceberg reaction time, didn’t notice anything strange. The Selbees continued this mission for a full decade without the state noticing. Eventually, a group of students at MIT noticed a flaw in the math too, and started buying up tickets.”

Of course MIT jumped in. 🙂 All kidding aside, there’s no “hacking involved.” It was just lottery designers being a little sloppy with their math. 🙂

OK this last one has nothing to do with month but is absolutely CRAZY – Toledo Zoo first to record biofluorescence in Tasmanian Devils [WTOL]:

The Toledo Zoo is excited to report the first documented case of biofluorescence in Tasmanian devils!

Biofluorescence refers to the phenomenon by which a living organism absorbs light and reemits it as a different color.
#ToledoZoo #Biofluorescence #TasmanianDevils pic.twitter.com/IxhXvHzqMl

— Toledo Zoo (@ToledoZoo) December 5, 2020

A Tasmanian Devil’s eyes, ears AND snout are emitting a blue glow.

WHAT!?!?!?!?!??!

Someone once asked me, “is there a downside to index funds?” – yes, but it might not be the obvious answer:

The New Money Trust: How Large Money Managers Control Our Economy and What We Can Do About It [American Economic Liberties Project] – “In 2018, the late Vanguard founder Jack Bogle sounded an alarm about the risk that “a handful of giant institutional investors will one day hold voting control of virtually every large U.S. corporation. He said that the impact of this “growing dominance” on financial markets, corporate governance, and regulation will be “major issues in the coming era.””

The article is long and meaty, I scanned through most of it, but I enjoyed the slightly deeper dive into the impact of Covid on various funds. The shock of the crisis forced many “passive” funds to take action as a result of redemptions and price mismatches. (also the Federal Reserve stepped in)

The article goes into the risks of index funds after the section titled “Investment Funds and Risks to Financial Stability.”

Explore Or Exploit? How To Choose New Opportunities [Farnam Street] – “One big challenge we all face in life is knowing when to explore new opportunities, and when to double down on existing ones. Explore vs exploit algorithms – and poetry – teach us that it’s vital to consider how much time we have, how we can best avoid regrets, and what we can learn from failures. [..] One of the most important factors in determining whether to continue exploring or to exploit what you’ve got is time. Christian and Griffiths explain that ‘seizing a day and seizing a lifetime are two entirely different endeavors. . . . When balancing favorite experiences and new ones, nothing matters as much as the interval over which we plan to enjoy them.'”

Japan has 33,000+ businesses that are over a century old!

They offer powerful lessons about business and life – the last line is powerful.

This Japanese Shop Is 1,020 Years Old. It Knows a Bit About Surviving Crises. [The New York Times] – “Japan is an old-business superpower. The country is home to more than 33,000 with at least 100 years of history — over 40 percent of the world’s total, according to a study by the Tokyo-based Research Institute of Centennial Management. Over 3,100 have been running for at least two centuries. Around 140 have existed for more than 500 years. And at least 19 claim to have been continuously operating since the first millennium.”

If you’re a fan of the NBA, this next story is a fun look inside the bubble. I enjoy how normal the players seem to be.

The Most Magical Place on Earth [GQ] – “In early July, 22 NBA teams descended on Disney World in central Florida to take part in a once-in-a-lifetime experiment. More than 300 athletes boarded a series of repurposed Mickey Mouse tour buses and were scattered among three different hotels—the Gran Destino, the Yacht Club, and the Grand Floridian—each designed to cater to the needs and wishes of the kinds of people who travel vast distances for the immersive family fun of the Magic Kingdom.”

The Donut King who went full circle – from rags to riches, twice [BBC News] – “The family worked 12 to 17 hours a day, with all hands on deck. At the weekend the oldest children, Chet and Savy, then nine and eight, helped out by pouring coffee, packing doughnuts and folding boxes. During the week they went to school, where sometimes they were so hungry they stole snacks from other kids’ lunchboxes.”

Today, Paul Graham is best known as the co-founder of Y Combinator and a very creative thinker. (

I love his blog and this post is special:

How to Think For Yourself [Paul Graham] – “One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are. It’s hard to be a conformist if you don’t know what you’re supposed to conform to.”

How We Sold Our House To Zillow For A Profit [Beyond Pennies] – “In the Spring of 2019, we sold our Phoenix, AZ home to Zillow for a profit after owning it for two years. I’ll run through the steps of our transaction and our opinion of the process.” I had no idea Zillow bought houses! (hat tip to PersonalFinanceBlogs.com for finding this article)

How climate change could spark the next home mortgage disaster [Politico] – “Buyers and lenders are now able to assess the risks of climate change damage by using simple apps — a technological revolution that is placing a warning label on millions of properties from seaside New England to low-lying areas vulnerable to hurricanes across the Southeast to the arid, fire-prone hills of California. And once buyers start refusing to pay top dollar for such homes — and insurers stop underwriting policies on them — the more than trillion-dollar Fannie-Freddie portfolio could take an enormous hit, big enough to knock the economy into recession or worse.”

The Traffic Merchant [Buzzfeed News] – “Daniel Yomtobian built an empire on dubious online advertising traffic. It finally crumbled.”

It’s Thanksgiving in the United States today and I wanted to thank you for being a subscriber of Apex Money.

For J.D. and me, this has always been a fun project that has allowed us to share the fascinating things we find on the internet. It’s really nothing more than that.

We have no grand ambitions to turn this into a business or to “monetize” it with advertisements, we just want to share the things we find in the hopes that you enjoy them too. The only metric we ever look at is how many people sign up for the email newsletter. It shows us that people like it and, hopefully, share it with their friends.

If you like us, tell a friend, forward this email – it would really make our day. 🙂

As a bribe, I want to share with you a video that I think is absolutely hilarious because I’m really, deep down inside, just a 9-year-old boy – testing the wobbliness of hot dogs.

(this video is not indicative of the stuff we send out … OK, maybe a little bit)

Thanksgiving may look different this year but we hope you’re able to spend it with some folks you care about.

We’ll be back on Monday.

When I was younger, I played the piano. My parents wanted me to do it, so I did it (begrudgingly), and I was just playing music over and over again. I became “good” at playing the piano through sheer repetition.

I never learned about music. I never learned first principles about why some music “sounds” good and others don’t. I knew nothing about theory, I was just an imperfect robot.

One day, during a house party, I was watching my (music theater) friend playing the piano and he was explaining simple music concepts to someone else. I was riveted. It was like someone explaining gravity and it all making perfect sense. That’s the power of understanding first principles and, probably, one of my first aha moments.

How Julia Child Used First Principles Thinking [Farnam Street] – “There’s a big difference between knowing how to follow a recipe and knowing how to cook. If you can master the first principles within a domain, you can see much further than those who are just following recipes. That’s what Julia Child, “The French Chef”, did throughout her career.”

If It Hurts, It’s Probably True [Steli Efti, founder of Close] – “The truth is always simple. If it’s complicated, it’s probably not the truth. When things seem too complex, it’s probably a mind trick you’re playing on yourself because you don’t want to face the truth.”

2020 has been a dumpster fire – and now you can email a dumpster fire. 🙂

Email a Dumpster Fire.Literally. – “Send an email to dumpsterfire@hey.com with whatever you want to torch. Use plain text or an image attachment. PG-13 rules apply.” They print out your email and drop it in a dumpster fire. Wheeeeee!

Happy Thanksgiving Apexian! (unless you are outside the United States, then happy Thursday!)