The Strawman blog
Essays on investing, markets and thinking for yourself, from the Strawman investment club. A new one most weeks.
Latest essay
The Nasdaq fell 5.5% while most of us were tucked up in bed on Thursday night. It was the worst single-day drop since the Liberation Day tariff scare in April 2025, and it "wiped out," as the pundits like to say, roughly US$2 trillion…
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I have a bit of a man crush on David Heinemeier Hansson. Most programmers know him as DHH, the guy who built…
If you've been even half paying attention, you'll know that the AI genie is well and truly out of the bottle. Even…
To make the case for long-term investing, you need little more than a multi-decade chart of the market. At that scale the benefits are undeniable: bottom left to top right,…
Investing is a humbling game. You can build the most detailed discounted cash flow model, scrutinise every footnote in the annual report and interrogate management until you're blue in the…
For a very, very long time, staying with the group was almost always the safe bet. Free-thinking contrarians who questioned whether there really was a lion generally didn’t last long…
“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.” Benjamin Franklin As investors, we want to buy when a stock is cheap and sell…
In investing, as in life, experience is usually the best teacher. But it’s still easy to learn the wrong lessons.
US shares are now on Strawman. You can paper trade them in the same portfolio as your ASX holdings, with the same play money, all in Australian dollars. Roughly 550…
There is something deeply triggering about billionaires. Especially those who hold obnoxious political views, post like manic teenagers, or simply come across as insufferable twats.
As a younger investor, I was convinced there was really only one proper way to invest. Essentially, unless you were investing like Buffett, you were a degenerate speculator on a…
If AI continues to make building systems and writing programs cheaper and easier, we will need a lot fewer developers. In fact, a lot fewer professional roles in general.
Of the US market's greatest compounders, only six averaged more than 20% a year over their lifetime. Six! But they weren't the ones that led the pack.
Investors keep having the same argument about AI, but it’s the wrong one. There can be a genuine, society-altering technology and a very expensive, very crowded trade sitting on top…
The Kelly Criterion won’t give you the true odds — but it will stop you betting the house on a number you invented.
