The Last Straw

There’s a special kind of psychological torture that comes with small-cap investing. Only at the spicier end of the market can you find yourself twice as wealthy as you were five years ago, yet half as rich as you were last spring. Rationally, it’s a great outcome, and pretty much the journey you should expect. But in a weird way, […]

Against all odds, and despite my highly questionable coding skills, the new Strawman website is officially out in the wild. As I’m sure you’ve seen by now, we threw out the old (and rather worn) front-end interface and rebuilt it from the ground up. It took a mountain of caffeine and an excessive amount of swearing at the computer screen, but […]

Scroll through Financial Twitter and you’ll quickly find yourself drowning in a sea of absolute certainty. Everyone, it seems, knows exactly where the price of oil is heading next month, what the next Fed rate decision will be, and exactly where the market will be at year’s end. It’s exhausting. But the reality is that, in this game, certainty sells. […]

Markets remain obsessed with AI, which continues to suck up investor attention and capital like a black hole. It’s easy to dismiss it all as hype — and there’s plenty of that out there — but I’ve found myself increasingly convinced that there really is something very significant underway. Not so much because of the undeniable seduction this thing has for one’s […]

Your ego is your worst investment adviser. A simple notebook — or a few honest Straws — might just be your most valuable portfolio tool.

There is precisely one way for an entrepreneur to know if there is actual demand for their product or service: put it out there. They must run the experiment to see if the open market validates their hypothesis. Focus groups and market research are fine, but true validation only happens when customers willingly and repeatedly part with their hard-earned cash. […]

We love to speak of “the market” as though it were some grand, external force. A sentient, often malevolent titan whose outcomes can be predicted, controlled, or judged as morally “right” or “wrong”. Something to be exploited, mastered, or controlled. But that completely misunderstands its anatomy. The market is not a static thing; it is a process. It is something […]

Peter Lynch nailed it when he said: “The stock doesn’t know you own it.” The market has absolutely zero memory of how many hours you spent digging through a company’s annual reports before buying. It doesn’t know your name, it doesn’t know your cost basis, and it doesn’t care how long you’ve held it. It doesn’t know anything. Obviously. Yet, […]

On paper, the modern Australian economic story is a masterclass in resilience. Judged by our preferred metrics, we have fully earned our moniker as the Lucky Country, routinely dodging the worst global financial storms of recent decades. There’s a lot to be thankful for. And there are few other places most of us would choose to live. But that doesn’t […]

A concentrated portfolio is not for the faint of heart. For those willing to shoulder the volatility, it offers the prospect of returns far beyond what broad diversification can provide. But by that same token, it invites far deeper losses. It is a question of degrees, of course, but the unavoidable truth remains: if you want to materially outperform the […]