35 articles
Reading Notes · Personal Development for Smart People — Part 1
Steve Pavlina's framework starts with an arrest at 19. Reading notes on Truth, Love, and Power — the three pillars beneath all genuine growth.
Reading Notes · Personal Development for Smart People — Part 2
Pavlina derives Oneness, Authority, Courage, and Intelligence from three primitives. The framework is elegant — but does the math actually hold?
Reading Notes · Personal Development for Smart People — Part 3
Pavlina's seven-principle theory collides with habits, career, and money — and the friction is instructive.
Reading Notes · Personal Development for Smart People — Full Book Synthesis
What Steve Pavlina's seven-principle framework gets right, where it strains, and why it still matters for people who think too much.
Reading Notes · Personal Development for Smart People — Part 4
Pavlina's Truth-Love-Power model encounters health, relationships, and spirituality — where it holds up, where it strains, and what to do with the uncertainty.
Reading Notes · The Intelligent Investor — Part 1
Graham's opening three chapters redefine what 'investment' actually means — and the answer is more demanding than most of us want to hear.
Reading Notes · The Intelligent Investor — Part 2
Graham's chapters 4-7 draw a hard line between defensive and aggressive investors — and warn that the dangerous position is thinking you're one when you're really the other.
Reading Notes · The Intelligent Investor — Part 3
On Graham's most powerful parable, why price volatility is opportunity not risk, and what most people get wrong about funds and advisors.
Reading Notes · The Intelligent Investor — Part 4
Graham's analytical framework for chapters 11–15: why EPS deceives, what seven criteria actually screen for, and how enterprising investors hunt for bargains.
Reading Notes · The Intelligent Investor — Full Book Synthesis
A full-book synthesis of Graham's Intelligent Investor — what the three pillars of his philosophy mean together, and what ordinary investors should actually do with them.
Reading Notes · The Intelligent Investor — Part 5
Graham's final chapters on convertibles, cautionary cases, and the investment philosophy that outlives every bull market.
Reading Notes · Poor Charlie's Almanack — Part 1
Reading notes on Poor Charlie's Almanack Part 1 — Munger's biography, his investment partnership record, and what it means to age without illusions.
Reading Notes · Poor Charlie's Almanack — Part 2
Charlie Munger's latticework of mental models isn't self-help advice — it's a precise argument for why single-discipline thinkers are epistemically doomed.
Reading Notes · Poor Charlie's Almanack — Part 5
Munger's masterwork lecture on human misjudgment, the financial scandals he predicted, and what a 79-year-old genius told law graduates about living well.
Reading Notes · Poor Charlie's Almanack — Full Book Synthesis
A full-book synthesis of Poor Charlie's Almanack — how mental models, psychology of misjudgment, and investment practice form one self-consistent system.
Reading Notes · Poor Charlie's Almanack — Part 3
Reading Notes on Poor Charlie's Almanack Part 3: Munger's extemporaneous talks on investing, Wall Street, management, and the art of not being an idiot.
Reading Notes · Poor Charlie's Almanack — Part 4
Six lectures that form the intellectual core of Poor Charlie's Almanack — inverse thinking, mental models, and why narrow specialists are dangerous.
Reading Notes · The Way of Munger — Part 1
Reading notes on Charlie Munger's 1987–1995 Wesco Financial shareholder meeting speeches — on the S&L crisis, acquisition discipline, and the art of knowing what you don't know.
Reading Notes · The Way of Munger — Part 4
Reading notes on The Way of Munger Part 4 — how losing a monopoly gave Charlie Munger a new stage for his most candid thinking.
Reading Notes · The Way of Munger — Part 2
How Munger navigated the dot-com bubble from 1996 to 2002 — not by predicting its collapse, but by understanding why he had no business being in it.
Reading Notes · The Way of Munger — Part 5
Reading Notes · The Way of Munger — Part 5: Charlie Munger's 2019–2022 Daily Journal remarks, where a man approaching 100 had nothing left to prove and everything left to say.
Reading Notes · The Way of Munger — Part 3
Munger's Wesco Financial years 2003–2010: derivatives warnings nobody heeded, the BYD bet, and the quiet end of a 35-year run.
Reading Notes · The Way of Munger — Full Book Synthesis
A synthesis of Charlie Munger's complete shareholder meeting remarks (1987–2022): what stayed constant, what evolved, and what it all adds up to.
The Four Foundations of Lasting Prosperity
William Bernstein's four conditions for lasting prosperity, and what their presence or degradation means for long-term investors.
Reading Toshihiko Itaya's *World Financial History* as an investor — on bubbles, broken risk models, and the shared illusions that underpin every market.
Reading Notes · Systematic Trading — Part 3
A walkthrough of Robert Carver's modular framework — from individual forecasts through position sizing to full portfolio construction.
Reading Notes · Systematic Trading — Complete Guide
A complete analytical overview of Robert Carver's Systematic Trading — what it teaches, who it's for, and how to approach reading it.
Reading Notes · Systematic Trading — Part 1
Lessons from Robert Carver's Systematic Trading, Part One: the cognitive biases that sabotage discretionary traders, and why rules beat gut feelings.
Reading Notes · Systematic Trading — Part 4
Robert Carver's Part Four presents three concrete archetypes — from simple ETF rebalancing to full automation — to help you find your systematic path.
Reading Notes · Systematic Trading — Part 2
Lessons from Robert Carver's Systematic Trading, Part Two: why beautiful backtests fail and how handcrafting beats optimization.
Reading Notes · Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom (2nd Ed.) — Full Book Synthesis
A synthesis of Van K. Tharp's complete argument: why trading success decomposes into psychology, position sizing, and system development — and how each pillar supports the others.
Reading Notes · Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom — Part Four
The culmination of Tharp's framework: what profitable traders share, why Expectunity adds a third dimension to expectancy, and why position sizing — not entry signals — is the real holy grail.
Reading Notes · Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom — Part Three
A coin-flip entry beats most retail traders. Tharp's Part Three explains why: setups, entries, stops, and exits are not equal — exits are where profits are actually made, and most traders have their attention allocation exactly backwards.
Reading Notes · Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom — Part Two
Van Tharp turns the question around: instead of predicting markets, build systems with measurable statistical edges. Notes on system philosophy, macro context, and why expectancy — not win rate — is the only number that matters.
Reading Notes · Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom — Part One
Van K. Tharp opens with a confrontational claim: most traders fail not for lack of a good system, but because they've never examined themselves. Notes on trading psychology, cognitive biases, and the R-multiple.