Staying The Course, Crypto Is Not Dead Yet, Charlie Javice Profile, AI Hype and Fear

Another TBB post featuring the most eclectic links around the web such as staying the course in investing, Crypto is not dead yet, Charlie Javice profile, AI hype and fear in overdrive, investing road map for midcareer accumulators, the Pentagon Papers, foreign accent syndrome, amazing photography, beheadings in a small Massachusetts island, 14 places to visit where nature puts on its own light show, a hilarious obituary, OceanGate and NBA Draft, my birthday, the miles/points hobby is in a difficult phase and more!

TBB Blog Mission: To Educate. Entertain. Inspire. In That Order!

Support TBB by applying for CREDIT CARDS or Buy Me a Coffee or visit our LINKS

I use and recommend Proton VPN <—– REFERRAL LINK

You like my blog? Send a link to someone please!

 

No ads, no clickbait. No sponsored posts.

NEW: This blog publishes every Friday. And whenever I feel like it, it may be Tuesday or Wednesday or maybe even on the weekend! Or just Friday…I don’t know! This is a one man labor of love operation.

 

PERSONAL FINANCE

I keep saying ignore market “gurus” making predictions! I refuse to answer questions like “Is this a good time to buy stocks?” or “Where do you think the S&P 500 Index will be next week/month/quarter/year?”. It is an amazingly useless exercise and waste of your time. More dangerously, it can mess with your head. And getting your head messed with almost always leads to subpar results, sometimes disastrous! Anyway, this was my properly placed intro into this “Staying The Course” article. You may have noticed a theme about sticking with your plan in my blog perhaps. Easy to say but very difficult to do! Some excerpts below:

Study after study has found that investors do better, on average, when they avoid reacting to their investments’ periodic ups and downs, and instead just stand there. I share that view, but this is sometimes easier said than done. That’s because—despite all the data—it just doesn’t feel like a satisfying strategy to submit to the whims of the market.

Prognosticators don’t know the future. They don’t know which way industries, companies or individual stocks are going. But that, in a way, is a good thing. It means you can safely tune out these folks and avoid reacting to their (flawed) predictions.

If companies were able to persevere—and even thrive, in many cases—despite the challenges of the past three years, that should reassure you that profits, and thus share prices, will continue to rise, despite periodic downturns.

The more dramatic the prognostication, the more likely it is to get airtime. That means investors hear less from commentators with more balanced views. It’s not a great situation. But as individual investors, we can use this to our advantage. By recognizing that a lot of financial news is really just entertainment, it’s easier to tune it out.

Headline stress disorder…is the detrimental result of our always-on media culture. By now, it’s not news that “doomscrolling” on social media impacts our mental health. But research has found that it may even be affecting our physical health—at the DNA level. To be sure, this research is evolving. But in combination with all of the other factors, I see this as another compelling reason to take Bogle’s advice. When those around you are losing their heads, there’s no need to join them.

Here is an article for readers in their 40s and 50s: An Investing Road Map for Midcareer Accumulators. Key financial priorities for investors in the peak earnings years of their 40s and 50s. I am in agreement here.

Here are some key priorities to keep in mind if you’re a midcareer accumulator looking to make sure you’re on the right track with your financial and investing life.

1. Nurture your human capital.
2. Balance college funding with other goals.
3. Protect what you have.
4. Combat lifestyle creep and step up your savings.
5. Employ additional accounts for retirement savings.
6. Begin to derisk your portfolio.
7. Don’t assume a larger portfolio means more complexity.
8. Rightsize your advice.

 

CRYPTO

So, Is Crypto Dead? Well, as I am typing this, bitcoin’s price is over $30,000 again! Amazing that this “asset class” just does not want to die! Actually, we had some developments last week with a few more companies filing for a Bitcoin ETF with the SEC, most importantly Blackrock. And then we had some big guns get together to actually really go ahead and set up an exchange for institutional clients that will adhere to actual accepted practices and none of the decentralized scam prone shit we have been annihilated with over so many years…If you have been reading my blog, you know I was never a crypto fan. I actually posted this special warning before the latest collapse. The Atlantic article pretty much puts together all the reasons why crypto has not taken off but the one I always come back to is….SCAMS!!!!

In the world of crypto, big firms are scams. Little firms are scams. Stable coins are scams; exchanges are scams; NFT schemes are scams; initial coin offerings are scams; tokens are scams. Firms run by self-proclaimed altruists are scams. Firms run by the shadiest dudes you can possibly imagine are scams. “There have been a lot of putatively decentralized Web3 companies that were really just three guys and a pair of servers in a pump-and-dump coin scheme,” Will Wilkinson, the head of policy at TBD, a bitcoin-focused subsidiary of the fintech giant Block, told me. And even simple, legitimate crypto activity remains prone to fraud. Hackers purloined nearly $4 billion of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies last year alone, according to the research group Chainalysis.

 

SCAMS

If you are interested in scams we have mentioned here several times how a young founder of a financial aid startup managed to sell it to JP Morgan Chase for a cool $175 Million. Until she got sued for fraud. This is a must read imho: The unauthorized profile of Charlie Javice, the millennial founder accused of fooling JPMorgan to the tune of $175 million. We must let the court process proceed, innocent until proven guilty. But, oh my, the author goes deep into her upbringing and parents and schooling and…I keep shaking my head. Somewhere along the line I think she crossed the line to breaking the law it appears. Also, very interesting that she is fighting all charges instead of going for a deal with the prosecutors, I guess we will find out soon if this is the right legal strategy. And, you know, when is Netflix coming out with a special about her and who is the actor to play her, any suggestions?

Her dad is French and has been around the investment industry, including stints with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. Her mom had her own life coaching business and would not stop posting on Facebook showing off how amazing her daughter was. They divorced and Charlie lived with her dad. She lived like she had lots of money and she was extremely ambitious and charismatic. It immediately brought to mind Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, currently locked up for 11 years. Anyway, it is an excellent well done investigative journalism article, thanks to the writer.

 

AI

I am still learning about AI and am being cautious. I am seeing a lot of grifters move to it from the crypto/blockchain/web3/NFT space so I am wary. And most of the hype is being unleashed by the exact same people who have a conflict of interest in hyping it up! Anyway, this is a good read: We are spectacularly bad at predicting the future. Ignore the AI hype and fear. Nobody actually knows what will come of AI. But we can console ourselves with the knowledge that nobody has ever really known anything about the future.

Many of today’s claims about AI seem reasonable. But the problem is that every new technology inevitably exhausts itself at some point and ceases to develop in any fundamental way — and what is especially difficult is that we can never know what that limit will be or when it will arise…Then again, sometimes technology really does deliver, and sometimes it suddenly pushes beyond what seemed like a developmental limit. Maybe even the wildest predictions about AI are woeful underestimations. The point is that we have always been terrible at predicting the future and that our inability to do so is a strange but inescapable truth. 

Ancient Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily may have put it best when he said, “What is strange is not that unexpected things happen, but that not everything which happens is unexpected.”

Anybody can say we will have flying cars or establish a lunar base, but it is much harder to invent flying cars or take us to the Moon. Anybody can hold forth about what AI will or will not do. Rarer are those with the intention and means to bring such possibilities to life. These people we ought to take more seriously.

Also, it is amazing how fast companies can do this!