Tag: money

Joe Michael Sasanuma, who earlier today died at the eternal age of 18, never had a moment in which he didn't enjoy life.

He lived by the words "What's the point of living if you can't feel alive?", a line fittingly taken from the James Bond movie "The World is Not Enough".  Of the many things

This post is about the art of responsible gambling.

The phrase "responsible gambling" may sound like an oxymoron, but it is not in fact a contradiction in terms.  And there is "art" involved in responsible gambling because tact and subtlety are necessary in delicately balancing chance, cost and entertainment involved with gambling.

The first rule of responsible

I think I was in sixth grade when I first engaged in a debate. It was at my weekly Saturday Japanese school and for reasons unclear, the topic de jour was which is better: coins or bills. For reasons even more unclear, I took the side of vigorously defending the existence of coins while my

Last week, I learned of a ridiculous fact that Justin Bieber earned $50 million this year.  Besides making me think I definitely made a wrong career choice, it got me thinking about what I would do if I had $50 million...

I'll go to Monaco on a $1 million cruise trip and put $2 million on

My investment advice can be summarized one word:  valuation.  Through painful and expensive lessons in more than a decade of investing, I learned that when you buy “popular” stocks that everyone knows about, you get burned badly because they inevitably become overvalued.  It’s the function of the law of supply and demand.  When everyone’s buying

During the day, I pretty much do nothing but obsess about my stock portfolio.  Over the years, I've had difficulty convincing my friends, including my colleagues who do this kind of work, that investing in the stock market is not akin to gambling.  Perhaps the image of my beaming face when I talk about a

Is Apple's stock (AAPL) overvalued?  As a person who's been following the stock since the mid 1990s and has owned shares since 2007, let me play devil's advocate.

I think the best advice I can give anyone about stocks is "buy what you understand."

This mnemonic is easily confused with its deceptive cousin "Buy what you know."  People--and I used to be one of them--are fond of buying stocks of companies that they "know," usually from using the company's products but sometimes from something

I recently finished reading "The Smartest Guys in the Room," an amazing account of the characters who were complicit in the rise and fall of Enron.   It is a page turner; I couldn't put it down.

The authors, Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, tell a story of how exaggeration, manipulation and obsession with the numbers, particularly

A buddy suggested I write about stocks to increase readership to this blog.  Why he thinks this is a winning strategy is beyond me.  I wrote  about the same kind of stuff in a weekly column called "Strictly Business" 87 times in four years in college but I got more attention the one time I wrote

A couple years ago when I was in law school, a friend of mine who was overwhelmed with credit card debt asked me to figure out how much in monthly payments she should make in order to fully pay off the debt in a certain number of years.  Although the math was rather easy to