An evergreen quote..................

 

Your best strategy is to focus on what you can control.

-Tony Isola, from here

Ed. Note: happily, the list of things we can control is fairly small.

That's a lot of equity........................

 

Since the start of the pandemic, U.S. homeowners have added more than $13 trillion in home equity. As recently as 2015, that was the total amount of home equity.

-Ben Carlson, as he looks at the housing market

Ceaseless..................

 

...............................................flow.

A couple of bottles of wine and a few cigars......

 

..........................and we might make a dent in this.  Worth trying anyway.

The more things change..........................

 

.......................the more they stay the same:

Still, he preferred the nomination of Seward, whom he viewed as a real Republican, to the nomination of Bates or Bell, the elderly conservatives whose names were often mentioned that Spring.  "I have lost patience with what I hear of hunting of the fossils," Chase wrote to a friend.  "It will do for paleontologists but not for Republicans."

-Walter Stahr, Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival.  The setting is the campaign for the Republican presidential candidate in 1860.

Turn the TV off....................

 Your most precious asset isn’t your financial portfolio; it’s your attention.

Media outlets are fighting tooth and nail to capture bandwidth by any means necessary. Their favorite tactic is to scare the hell out of you.

-Tony Isola

A few little ideas....................

 

Remember this the next time you hear a confident political forecast. No one knows anything, even when it looks obvious.

-Morgan Housel, from here

On bigness..........................

 Adversarial interoperability creates productivity and value. And having a smaller part of a more vibrant market is far better than dominating a moribund one.

-Seth Godin, from here

according to history, anyway...............

 

Rebellion is treason until successful . . .

-Salmon P. Chase

Never bet against Big Al..........................

 

    via

Blaming the voters...............

 

Congress won’t tackle the debt unless Americans force the issue.

Good thing, since that is where he works.........

 I am endlessly fascinated by the human element of financial markets. It’s a constant cycle of fear, greed, envy, panic, and euphoria. The financial markets are like a laboratory for testing human emotions and behavior on a grand scale.

Things can go from boring to exciting in the blink of an eye because human nature never changes.

I love the stock market.

-Ben Carlson, from here

accountable versus responsible.....

 

“The quality of a decision increases directly proportional to the degree to which the person is responsible.

If I tell you to do something, you’re accountable but not responsible. Following a process makes you accountable, not responsible. Using judgment to opt out of the process makes you responsible. Completing assigned homework makes you accountable. Seeking out additional resources to deepen your understanding makes you responsible. Remembering your partner’s birthday makes you accountable. Consistently finding ways to make them feel appreciated makes you responsible.

Focusing on accountability does little to improve the quality of decisions. Embracing responsibility does.”

-from this Farnum Street post

demand...............................

 

The world, Solzhenitsyn said, “will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.”

-as culled from this Douglas Murray post

Putting responsibility where it belongs....

 

"No people can be truly free," he wrote, "unless they are exempt from the debasing influence of ignorance and vice.  Upon the knowledge and integrity of the people rests the whole fabric of self-government."

-Walter Stahr, Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival

Opening paragraphs........................

 

The first indication of trouble was the light burning in the kitchen window of Wexford Cottage.  Vera Hobbs, owner of the Cornish Bakery in Gunwalloe, spotted it at 5:25 a. m. on the third Tuesday of January.  The day of the week was noteworthy; the owner of the cottage, Professor Charlotte Blake, divided her time between Cornwall and Oxford.  Typically, she arrived in Gunwalloe on a Thursday evening and departed the following Monday afternoon—three-day work-weeks being one of the many perquisites of academic life.  The absence of her dark blue Vauxhall suggested she had decamped at her usual time.  The glowing light, however, was an aberration, as Professor Blake was a devout environmentalist who would rather stand in the path of a speeding train than waste a single watt of electricity.

-Daniel Silva, A Death in Cornwall