The Inimitable Tiff

[The market for financial advice] has two major problems. First, you are unlikely to get rich advising people to buy a set of index funds and rebalance their portfolios every six months - not a lot of recurring business there. Most of the advice, as Shiller points out, comes from people who are biased - primarily people who are trying to sell you financial products that, in my opinion, are probably not good for you,* but also people trying to sell you books and magazines about which financial products you should buy.

Second, people want to believe there is a way to get rich. The idea that, given a sufficiently liquid market, anything you happen to know about a company (say, because you read it in The Wall Street Journal) is already priced into the stock price is deeply unintuitive to the human brain. And the idea that you can only rely on a very low real rate of return - basically, the yield on Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities - is something many people simply do not want to accept.

I love the fact my pessimistic side agrees with this perspective 100%, yet I’d work for a startup with a incredibly risky business model and even more risky options schemes. At least I’ve never worked for *just* options.