(The investment opinions expressed in this article are my own. Please do your own due diligence before investing.)

I’ve become extremely fascinated by the idea of economic fragility. That as countries borrow increasingly more (both public and private sector), it makes them increasingly economically fragile.

Make no mistake public and private debt are closely related. The first point to understand is that debt and spending are two sides of the same coin. People, companies, and governments borrow in order to consume or invest. So one person’s debt often becomes another’s income.

When the productivity of the economy is not enough…

(Not intended to be investment advice)

What a week. The ebullient markets of just a week or two ago now seem like a distant memory. The stock market is volatile and scary again and everything seems to be going down.

But it’s also important to keep things in perspective — despite all the turbulence, markets are just a bit off their all-time highs.

A big part of machine learning is classification — we want to know what class (a.k.a. group) an observation belongs to. The ability to precisely classify observations is extremely valuable for various business applications like predicting whether a particular user will buy a product or forecasting whether a given loan will default or not.

Data science provides a plethora of classification algorithms such as logistic regression, support vector machine, naive Bayes classifier, and decision trees. …

The 2008 Financial Crisis was a defining moment in my investment experience. I was just starting my career then (I was in business school at the time). When Lehman (anyone remember them?) went down, it felt like the world as we knew it was ending.

It’s hard to imagine right now, but back then there was the real threat of bank runs and financial system collapse.

It was also when non-traditional monetary policy tools like QE (Quantitative Easing) were first widely introduced because interest rates hit zero at a time when the economy still needed stimulating.

For me, 2008 was…

(Not intended to be investment advice. Please do your own due diligence prior to investing.)

Ioften write about investing and sometimes hint at the stocks I own, so I figured I might as well just be completely transparent.

I want to be clear — I am not recommending any of these stocks. Keep in mind that many of these stocks I have owned for years, and the valuations and catalysts that attracted me to them then may be in shorter supply today. …

(Heads up — this story is not finance or investing related.)

If this is already widely known, then I apologize.

I have not eaten a Costco croissant since I was in college. As a college student, my friends and I used to by two boxes of croissants, two boxes of Chicken Bakes, and a bag of taquitos every time we went to Costco. Variety was not a spice in our life at that point in time.

I got so sick of those three things that since graduating college, I have not touched the Costco variety of them.