Good reads from around the Web. I wrote a big introductory musing article about the state of the world as usual this morning, but it’s so long that I’ve decided to save it for a future post in its own right. It was riffing on...

The 5:2 fasting diet is all the rage. And as a fan of the occasional bout of nil by mouth, I’m not surprised. Sensible fasting can throw the reset switch on conditions such as Hungry Hippo-itus, whereby a cheeky slice of cake in January ...

A friend of mine used to torment himself with visions of a suave bogeyman named Dex. The imaginary Dex was better looking, richer, and more virile in every respect. And he prevented my friend from forming meaningful relationships. Every ...

Good reads from around the Web. I seem to have spent years arguing – online and off – with men (invariably men) who are 10-30 years older than me – about exactly the wrong problems. There’s a certain type of clever man who tends to...

I see the peer-to-peer pioneer Zopa has evolved again, with the company introducing “Safeguard”, a new and arguably safer way to lend money. Hitherto Zopa has worked by matching individual lenders and borrowers in a marketpla...

Looks like it’s game over for cash rebates and the last surviving refuges where small passive investors are spared the pain of significant platform charges. Within a year, we’re going to be choosing from clean class funds with slimmed do...

Good reads from around the Web. The tensions between inequality, meritocracy, communism and the incentives of capitalism have been endlessly debated over the years. But for too long capuchin monkeys were denied their say. This injustice ...

Are chimps making chumps out of trackers? In a trial of the fittest run by academics at Cass Business School, traditional market cap weighted indices were beaten by indices picked by 10 million monkeys (or rather by their randomly genera...

Between 1956 and 2011, the value premium has been worth an extra 3.5% in the UK1. That’s an annualised return – so that’s 3.5% on top of what you’d have wrung out of the FTSE All-Share, every year. That’s the kind of come hither ta...

Always be alert to the different ways in which large numbers can be (mis)interpreted when trying to make sense of the world. Never forget: You’re an upgraded ape with delusions of grandeur, designed to hunt gazelles and run away fr...