Investing Q&A: Small Caps vs Large Caps, Increasing Your Circle of Competence and Should Value Investors Buy Gold? Part 1 – Ep 66

A great speaker can bend logic with emotions and exert undue influence on your decision making. The better someone speaks, the more discriminating your Sophist filter needs to be.

On Jonah and Molly's wedding

Here is what changed my mind. Not something about gold, but many things about the dollar. The US dollar is the world's reserve currency. It has had a well-deserved place since WWII, and that rested on three things: the largest, steadiest, most diverse economy; a politically stable democracy; the best military.

Narrative change is a reversal of mass behavior. Economics and stock market valuation are governed by soft laws, but the reality bent by human behavior can disagree with these soft laws for much longer than rational actors would expect, or stay solvent. The change, going from euphoria to despair, is a change in narrative.