Published July 18, 2025
As summer hits full steam (and heat!), we will dive into our archives and post a few briefs from our Knowledge Base. The Knowledge Base section of our website contains historical notes about investing and how to best use our TimingCube system and website. Enjoy!
A couple of recent articles struck our fancy by talking about the link between money, life “efficiency”, and how all that relates to our happiness. At the bottom, we have a link to an article from The Economist magazine talking about the impact Amazon is having on Wal-Mart. One sentence from that article resonated as being really about the life and happiness of their customers:
What Walmart did for Americans’ wallets, Amazon is doing for their time. The Economist article: Thinking outside the box.
It seems there is an increasing view in certain segments of the population that acquiring money and wealth, while obviously valuable, is not the ultimate goal. Instead, money as a means to an end of more free time, the ability to pursue more of our interests, have more flexibility, better health, et al. is really what this game is all about. Indeed, successful entrepreneur Mark Cuban has stated:
Time is the most precious commodity. Time is more valuable than money. How effectively you manage your time will have far more impact on your success than any amount of money.
Amazon (and many other companies these days) focuses on giving us access to a shopping experience that is a more efficient use of our time, in addition to being about cheaper and of greater value. The value is in the efficiency and the time we save. To some degree, that is also the premise behind the coming revolution in driving. Self-driving cars will ultimately free up our time in addition to making us safer and extending our life satisfaction.
We bridge from the retailing revolution’s focus on giving customers more time as a way to give them more ‘happiness’ to the article below from former Wall Street Journal columnist Jonathan Clements talking about his book, which considers as a key topic the intersection of money, investing, and the pursuit of happiness. We particularly connect with Step 5 as our core philosophy is to protect our wealth by “not losing”, not suffering the damage the market can throw at us which leads us to win and grow our wealth in the long-run.
Herewith is that article which essentially provides a brief overview of the book:
There are those who think the goal is to beat the market and amass as much wealth as possible, that street smarts and hard work ensure investment success, and that the road to happiness is paved with more of everything.
And then there are those who get it.
Want a more prosperous, less stressful financial life? How to Think About Money, scheduled for publication on Sept. 1, 2016, is here to help. The book’s goal: to provide readers with a coherent way to think about their finances, so they worry less about money, make smarter financial choices and squeeze more happiness out of the dollars that they have. How to Think About Money focuses on five key steps:
Step No. 1: Buy More Happiness. There is a connection between money and happiness, but the relationship is far messier than most people imagine. If we want to get the most out of our dollars, we need to think much harder about how we spend and which goals we pursue.
Step No. 2: Bet on a Long Life. Most of us will enjoy an amazingly long life that will often see us pursue more than one career and spend perhaps 20 or 30 years in retirement. That has big implications for how we handle our money.
Step No. 3: Rewire Your Brain. Thanks to the instincts we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we are hardwired to fail both as savers and as investors. Result: It takes great self-discipline-or, in the absence of self-discipline, a certain amount of self-deception-to manage money successfully.
Step No. 4: Think (Really, Really) Big. We divvy up our financial life into a series of buckets, thinking of our insurance policies as separate from our bank accounts, and our stock-bond investment mix as unrelated to our debts. But to manage money prudently and make the right tradeoffs, we need to bring together all of these financial pieces-and the central organizing principle should be our paycheck, or lack thereof.
Step No. 5: To Win, Don’t Lose. To get ahead financially, we should think less about making our money grow and more about the dangers that could derail our financial future. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take risk by, say, investing heavily in the stock market or taking on a hefty mortgage to buy our first home. But even as we save and invest for the future, we should also aim to minimize potential subtractions from our wealth. Those subtractions might appear modest, like mutual fund expenses and stock trading costs, or they can be huge, such as selling shares at a market bottom or becoming disabled and yet not having disability insurance. Either way, there’s the potential for great financial damage. Book: How to Think About Money
Market Update
On Monday, investors woke to a new tariff announcement from Trump where he announced that the U.S. will impose 30% tariffs on the EU and Mexico starting August 1st. EU leaders and Mexico did not immediately escalate and said they will continue to negotiate. The markets yawned, closing up marginally. Major banks announced earnings early in the week, and while most surpassed analysts’ estimates, bank stocks mostly fell. The big hubbub was the news that Trump was about to fire Jay Powell, the Fed Chair, which sent markets reeling midday. Almost immediately however, Trump walked back the rumor, and, after the sharp initial dip, stocks recovered. Government data showed that hiring ticked higher, after dipping in the prior month and inflation, while rising, did not rise as sharply as many economists had feared. Friday brought muted trading with stocks inching lower, led by declines in shares of Netflix and American Express, despite both companies beating analysts’ estimates.
Overall, the Nasdaq and the S&P500 closed very close to their all-time highs, set earlier in the week, with the S&P500 closing with a weekly gain of 0.6% and the Nasdaq closing with a gain of 1.3%. The Dow Jones with a weekly loss of -0.1% was again the laggard, failing to surpass its high set the week of July 4th.
Warm wishes and until next week.