The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Housel: Writer's block means your underlying idea sucks and is wrong
“Good writing is very easy because if your idea is right, it's easy to articulate it. And if you get writer's block, the reason you have writer's block is because your idea sucks and it's wrong. And that, and that's why you're struggling to articulate it. So I …”
Housel: High IQ and exhaustive due diligence increase risk of self-delusion
“The harder you work at something, the more opportunities you have to fool yourself. So if you're very smart and you have a one 40 IQ and you went to Harvard and you work at Goldman Sachs and you spend six months doing due diligence on this deal, you are going …”
Housel: You cannot cut 20% of effort because waste is unpredictable
“When people talk about, oh, I could have been just as successful if I worked 20% less. Yeah, but you don't know which 20% of your work was wasted or not.”
Housel: Investors with gambling urges should allocate 20% to speculative trading
“And for that person, if you can convince them to say, Hey, can we put 80% of your money in index funds? And then this 20%, you can go nuts with, you can trade shit coins. You can go crazy. You can do anything you want with it. That, that is, it seems like bad …”
Housel: Vanguard monthly inflows exceed Robinhood's total assets under custody
“Vanguard brings in more money every month than Robin hood has in total.”
Housel: Free stock trading removed a vital speed bump against bad behavior
“It's hard to push back against free trading, like lower costs. That's great. But it removed a speed bump that incentivizes a lot of really bad behavior.”
Housel: Fewer recessions lead directly to larger subsequent economic downturns
“So it's like the fewer recessions that you have, the bigger the next recession is going to be.”
Housel: Modern markets are not more volatile, information is just processed faster
“And so I think you can make the argument that it's not that we have more bad news or even more volatility. It's just happens. Like we process the information so much faster.”
Housel: Tech industry threshold for founder BS has dropped significantly
“I think we've actually gotten much better in the last couple of years at separating storytelling from just charlatan bullshit. And like, there was a period when we weren't like, we were not very good at that. Probably, you know, late, late twenties, early twen…”
Housel: AI excels at micro writing feedback but fails at macro feedback
“I found that it's pretty good for what I would call micro feedback of just like, Hey, you probably needed a comma here. It's not that good for macro feedback of like, Hey, was this chapter good? Like, did it make any sense to you? It's like, so far it's not th…”
Housel: Readers only remember a few sentences from books that changed their lives
“Most people don't remember books. They remember a couple sentences from their books. So even if you're like, oh, I love that book. I read that book 10 years ago. Changed my life. Loved it. You probably remember like three or four sentences. And it's those, lik…”
Housel: The Psychology of Money audiobook outsells print two-to-one
“The audio book version of the psychology of money was selling twice as many copies as the physical paper version.”
Housel: Pillemer's study of 1,000 centenarians found zero regretted making less money
“It was a study from a gerontologist. His name is Carl Pillemer, and he studied 1000 elderly Americans. Most of them were 90 to a hundred years old. And he writes in his book that of the 1000 elderly people that he studied, not a single one of them, not one sin…”