The Writers Coin

For those of you that don’t know, I often try to market myself as the “Michael Lewis of personal finance.” Don’t believe me? Here is my author signature over on Wisebread:

See? I told you. And if it was totally up to me, I’d sign off with something like this:

Call it a bromance or a mancrush or whatever, but either way I have a serious infatuation with this man. And to make my point, I’ll point you in the direction of his latest article for Vanity Fair, which is an excerpt of his new book, The Big Short, which comes out March 15.

The article is about Michael Burry, an awkward guy that turns himself into a brilliant stock picker and overall investor. Sound familiar?

Hint: it starts with “W” and ends in “arren Buffett.”

Turns out Burry saw the sub-prime mortgage collapse before anyone else did and convinced some big investment banks to create a product that would allow him to short the whole thing.

It’s a super interesting read and I won’t go into much more detail. It’s also exciting because it means there’s a new book he’s been working on, which makes sense because he’s been kind of quiet recently.

With DFW passing away, Michael Lewis is at the top of my list of favorite authors. His latest is more vintage Michael Lewis goodness.

Check out my latest post over at Wisebread on four ways to make buy-and-hold investing more effective by using charts, options, value averaging, and predetermined returns. I’m especially intrigued by that first one, which I was very wary about at first but am starting to come around on.

I’m not  big believer in technical analysis, but this one seems to work pretty well and is rather conservative.

Jason over at FrugalDad was kind enough to let me run a guest post on his site. The post, entitled The Lesson Susan Boyle Taught the World, ran last week and is all about judging a book by its cover.

I was guilty of this when I wrote about MagicJack a few weeks ago for Wisebread. So the lesson behind the post may be a little cheesy and cliché, but there’s a reason why things are cliché.

I was also interviewed by the good folks over at MoneyHackers a couple of weeks ago. So if you want to know a little bit more about my blogging philosophy and where I see myself in two years, check it out.

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