(Not intended to be investment advice. Opinions are my own.)

Recently, I’ve been asked a lot about the value of meme stocks. People see the massive price moves and want to know what’s driving the surges in value along with the volatility.

But rather than focus on meme stocks (which is unproductive — the answer for the most part is FOMO, animal spirits, and collusion in order to impact supply and demand), let’s focus on what drives the value of stocks in general. There are four things that drive a stock’s value in the short and medium run:

1. Business prospects…

A long time ago I wrote this article. It got no love, but I still believe in what I said. So today, I’m going to say it again:

Blogging (while living overseas in a low-cost country) is a win-win! You earn U.S. or at least developed world rates of pay while paying a much lower cost of living.

I think I went a bit overboard with the analysis in my previous article. It’s really not a complicated concept. Writing on the Internet allows a writer to distribute his thoughts to anyone, anywhere in the world.

And if you live in…

I loved this article by Kareem Kudus. I was listening to a podcast yesterday and heard about the same cobra story that he shares as one of his examples of a seemingly intelligent plan backfiring.

I highly recommend reading the article but the cobra story goes like this:

• Too many cobras in colonial India.
• English government puts a 1 British Pound bounty on each cobra.
• People start hunting cobras and cobra population reduces. Cool!
• Farmers start raising cobras and turning them in for bounties in order to game the system.
• English government realizes that they’ve been had and cancel the…

(Not intended to be investment advice. Opinions are my own.)

You might argue that I’m being picky about semantics, but currency debasement and inflation are not the same thing. As an investor or just as a person who is impacted by economic forces, it’s important to recognize this.

There’s been a lot of recent discussion from more extreme types that hyperinflation is inevitable. There are even subreddits dedicated to this idea:

The premise of Wall Street Silver is that, because of sky-high debt, fiat currencies like the U.S. …

When I logged in to check my Medium earnings for the day, I was surprised to find another $500 bonus:

(Not intended to be investment advice. No position — writing this helps me think.)

It sounds crazy. I’ve been railing against bonds for the better part of a year. So why would I suddenly consider investing in levered bonds? This is the next part in my series on Treasury bonds, first part here:

When I say levered bonds, I mean going short cash to go long Treasury bonds. To help understand why this bet makes sense let’s first break down the drivers of return and risk for cash and Treasury bonds:

ReturnCash: Short Term Interest Rate - Inflation Rate…

Medium is always tweaking its algorithms. Below are a few things that I’ve noticed lately. Curious to hear if anyone else has noticed the same.

Follower Counts

Follower counts seem to be increasing much faster than before. I don’t pay too much attention to my follower count as even a large increase in followers doesn’t translate into significantly increased views for an article. But over the past few months my follower count has nearly tripled. I think I ended last year with around 5,000, now I’m at 14,000.

I also noticed that some of the other writers that I consider to be…

This week’s recommendations are centered around crypto and rising interest rates. I do worry a bit about crowded trades and the fact that literally everyone is expecting high inflation. But I’ve (with a great amount of hesitation) come around to the view that there’s few alternatives to stocks and precious metals, despite their elevated prices these days.

During these times, in my opinion, the best an investor can do is stay nimble and use security selection and reasonably priced hedges (via options) to provide a layer of protection.

Here are a few articles that offer various views on how to…