Rainbow on FI

After 7 consecutive work days, I am having the most unproductive slack-at-home Sunday today, munching popcorn and playing Bloon TD on my laptop. I have always been fascinated by games of strategy. I think the masterminds that designed these popular games are really geniuses - the game play objectives are always rather simple but so many creative elements can be incorporated into them to make it so satisfying to play.  I went back to playing Bloon TD again just to see how much the game has evolved since. It still remains a good game to teach kids how to spend wisely, albeit with some adrenaline rush. There have been no change to the kind of towers and tiers upgrade (I have maxed out on all of them), however, there are a whole lot of new power upgrades and some new game types / maps. Most of the time I just stick to playing Battle Arena which is a two-player game that pits me up against other players of similar win-rate. There are several little tricks to winning ...

I saw this article Five Lessons from History  from one of Uncle8888's post link. I find this article very insightful and here are a few paragraphs that are particularly resounding - "Downturns don’t happen in isolation. The reason stocks might fall 30% is because big groups of people, companies, and politicians screwed something up, and their screw ups might sap my confidence in our ability to recover. So my investment priorities might shift from growth to preservation. It’s difficult to contextualize this mental shift when the economy is booming. That’s why more people say they’ll be greedy when others are fearful than actually do it . The same idea holds true for companies, careers, and relationships. Hard times make people do and think things they’d never imagine when things are calm." How many of us have ever experienced a market crash bad enough to make us capitulate or want to capitulate? I think if you have experienced that, you might find the above as re...

We have been hearing about the inverted yield curve and how it signifies that recession is on the horizon. So what exactly is an 'inverted yield curve'? Source: Investipedia Let's take a look at the above chart. Short term yield is represented by the blue line (US 3-Yr Treasury Note) and long term yield is represented by the orange line (US 5-Yr Treasury Note). We can also substitute the 5-Yr note with say a 10-Yr note. As we can see, the orange line (short term yield) logically should stay above the blue line, since the note / bond holders are expecting higher compensation for the longer time frame of holding it and with a longer time frame comes more uncertainty. The right hand side indicated a point of inversion - when the orange line falls below the blue line. Why would this happen? As I am not good at explaining the technical stuff, so I shall leave that explaining to Investopedia here . Some important points I want to highlight are as follow: ...