Plain-English explainers: S&P 500, ETFs, dollar-cost averaging, compounding.
I bought two AI theme funds, watched them fall, and bought more on every dip — telling myself it was dollar-cost averaging. It was averaging down, which is close to the opposite. Here is the Gartner Hype Cycle I had never seen, what the 1840s railway boom and the dot-com bust actually cost their shareholders, and why knowing the curve would not have saved me.
A Kosdaq sidecar and a 19-year high in Treasury yields taught me that growth stocks carry hidden interest-rate duration too, so I ran the present-value math to see exactly how much they lose.
My long-duration Treasury fund dropped the week 30-year yields hit a 19-year high of 5.33%. Here’s the duration math behind it, and why it’s a small slice of my portfolio, not the core.
I picked individual stocks for fifteen years and lost money doing it. In 2024 I stopped and started buying the whole index instead. Here is the arithmetic on what a 1% fee costs over 30 years — and what the data says about people who keep trying.
A coworker asked how long his money takes to double and I could not answer without a spreadsheet. The Rule of 72 does it in three seconds, it is accurate to within a month between 6 and 9 percent, and it exposes the uncomfortable part: 54 percent of a 40-year outcome arrives in the final decade.
In July the Korean market had its third-worst month on record and, eleven days later, its best single day ever. Leveraged ETF holders lost in both directions. So did a $45 billion AI hedge fund holding the same stock — and the mechanism was identical.
My balance fell in July while nothing I own fell. Tracing why led me through three things I had wrong: that rates move stocks in one direction, that the Fed sets “the” interest rate, and that textbook theory explains currencies. It does not.
The Fed held rates at 3.5-3.75% on July 29, 2026 – but three of the twelve voters wanted a hike. Here is what the FOMC actually is, how its vote works, and how the decision reaches a pension account in South Korea.
Update — 30 July 2026: what actually happened. The Fed did not raise rates at the July 28–29 meeting. It
I checked my phone this morning the way I do most mornings — half out of habit, half out of