David Jansen

Retired California native now living in rural Japan. Interests include the Japanese language and culture, literature, photography, and financial markets.

[Lumen @lumenxbt]

Ten million people have watched an Australian high school teacher accidentally destroy the entire personal finance industry.

He filmed the lesson on a whiteboard in a regular Sydney classroom and put it on YouTube.

Robo-advisors charge two percent a year to hide the exact equation he teaches for free in seven minutes.

His name is Eddie Woo. He is a Sydney high school math teacher and one of ten finalists for the 2018 Global Teacher Prize.

For years he has been filming his regular lessons for students who missed class.

His entire framework fits on a napkin.

Every growth process has three parts: rate, time, result. The exponent is time. The logarithm pulls it out. Every doubling takes the same amount of time. Divide 72 by your annual return to get years to double. Linear charts lie. Log charts do not.

That last rule alone has probably cost the retirement industry a hundred million dollars in unbought pensions.

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

That is Al Bartlett, the physicist behind the most-watched lecture on exponential growth in history. Woo teaches the same idea in seven minutes.

Founders build financial models on linear axes and are surprised when the market grows ten times before their next investor meeting. Retail investors move in and out of the stock market and lose the exact number of doublings that would have made them rich.

The lesson is free on YouTube. Every textbook chapter on logarithms is a hundred years old.

Woo still teaches high school in Sydney. Almost none of the ten million viewers have ever divided 72 by their portfolio's return.

The math is free. The willingness to actually work out how many doublings you have left is the entire edge.

[Ben Carlson @awealthofcs]

Change in US household net worth from the end of 2019:

Total: +70%
Top 0.1%: +106%
Remaining top 1%: 63%
Next 9%: +57%
Next 40%: +74%
Bottom 50%: +129%

https://t.co/royJQiy7FM

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

This spring, I became the owner of an old garden cottage near a forest in a quiet Ukrainian village outside Kyiv.

There was a very old, badly neglected apple tree on the property. It had not blossomed and was also badly obstructing the house. Everyone around me told me not to waste my time -- that the tree was dead after the winter frosts and would never produce anything again. Just hire someone and cut the damn thing down.

But I felt sorry for it. I cleaned it up as best I could and gave it whatever care I knew how to provide. And what do you know? It produced an absolutely enormous crop of apples, so many that I could practically hand them out to strangers in the strees.

And I swear, they are the most incredibly delicious apples I have ever tasted. Trust me. Nothing from a supermarket even comes close.

The moral of the story: sometimes, one should just have faith and care.

[Shagun 💰 @shaguncrypto]

My uncle spent 25 years saving $800k for retirement.

Skipped vacations.
Drove the same car for 15 years.
Packed lunch every day.
Always said, We’ll enjoy it later.

He retired at 67.

At 69, he was gone.

His $800K portfolio went to his kids.

Within 18 months, it was spent on buying luxury cars, vacations and casinos.

Sometimes I wonder if we’re so focused on building wealth that we forget to build a life.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In the United States today, letting a six-year-old walk three blocks to the park alone
will get the police called on you for child neglect.
Parents wait in ninety-minute lines of SUVs outside schools to pick up their teenagers.

Now stand on a residential street corner in Tokyo at 7:45 a.m.

A group of six small children approaches.
The oldest is maybe ten years old.
The youngest is a six-year-old first grader.

They wear bright yellow safety hats and neat leather Randoseru backpacks.
There is not a single parent walking with them.

They walk in a tidy single file along the green painted safety lane on the side of the road.
They hold hands when crossing small alleys.
The older children constantly look back to make sure the little ones haven't stumbled.

At the main intersection, a retired grandfather wearing a neon green volunteer vest
stands holding a yellow handheld stop sign.
As the children approach, oncoming cars come to a complete, gentle halt ten feet back.

The children cross, turn toward the waiting drivers,
bow their heads in unison, and say:
"Arigato gozaimasu!"

The drivers smile and wave back.

This is not a fairytale. This is every Tuesday morning in every neighborhood in Japan.

A society has truly made it not when its wealthy citizens drive armored tanks,
but when a six-year-old child can walk a mile through a major metropolis
protected by nothing more than a yellow cotton hat
and the watchful love of an entire community.

[Jim Osman @EdgeCGroup]

@GoldTelegraph Real wealth is owning your time.