In the mid-1990s Federal Express had a problem. Though the company's safety record was exemplary, regulators had proposed new rules that would have posed an operational nightmare for the giant shipper. The company flew Boeing 727 air freighters that each accommodated eight containers. Though they [...]
Being too sure
In 1900, the noted physicist Lord Kelvin declared, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now.” In the annals of inaccurate proclamations, this one stands out. Just a few years later, Einstein published his Theory of Relativity and, in the following years, proceeded to upend many of the [...]
Succeeding like Kanye
Kanye West, it turns out, is one heck of an investor. According to a recent analysis, a group of West's stock picks this year has beaten the overall market by forty percentage points. It's an astonishing result. What, if anything, can we learn from it? First, some background: As you may know, West [...]
Great Eight
In 2013 a curious thing happened in Stockholm. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in economics to three academics who had developed theories about stock prices. What was odd was that two of the recipients — Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller — couldn't have been more opposed [...]

The opposite of Nostradamus
Over the course of his lifetime, the self-proclaimed fortune teller Nostradamus published more than six thousand different predictions. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see that there was little substance or predictive value in all of those prophecies. In fact, in his day, even the [...]
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