We are drowning in data, sometimes manipulated and often misread. I am not a statistician, but that did not stop me from creating my own version of a statistics class, with a finance/investing twist. Webpage: bit.ly/3ziYHl6 YouTube Playlist:
Session 1: is an introduction to the components that make statistics the data science, from sampling to regressions. Full disclosure that I may be ignoring what some statistics classes view as indispensable, but so what? bit.ly/3ziYHl6
Sessions 2 & 2A: Most statistical sins are in the sampling phase, where bias, explicit or implicit, permeates the process and poisons conclusion. The notion that researchers are unbiased and objective is myth, and their priors drive their conclusions. bit.ly/3ziYHl6
Sessions 3 & 3A: Measures of location, dispersion and skewness allow us to summarize large masses of data in a few numbers, sometimes in meaningful ways and sometimes not. If you cannot tell the mean from the median, trouble awaits you. bit.ly/3ziYHl6
Sessions 4 & 4A: In finance, our fondness for the normal distribution has burned us many times over, but when we struggle to even name alternatives to it, we are designed to repeat history. bit.ly/3ziYHl6
Sessions 5, 5A & 5B: In investing & corporate finance, we are constantly on the search for interrelationships between variables, partly to help us understand their co-movement, but more in the hope that we can use them to predict the future. bit.ly/3ziYHl6
Sessions 6, 6A & 6B: If life and investing is a game of chance, probabilities allow us to assess what to do. Given that reality, it is surprising that we don't see decision trees and simulations used more broadly in finance & investing. bit.ly/3ziYHl6
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I am on sabbatical this academic year, and while I will not be teaching my corporate finance & valuation classes at NYU in Spring 2026, the full versions of my Spring 2025 classes, with lectures, class material and tests/exams are accessible online. bit.ly/3Y87KDx
NYU offers certificate versions of my valuation, corporate finance and investment philosophy classes, with valuation in both fall and spring, corporate finance in the fall and investment philosophies in the spring. execed.stern.nyu.edu/collections/ta…
If the NYU price tag is off-putting or budget-busting, I offer free versions of all three of these classes, as well as four others, with recorded lectures and supporting material. Since they are free, they come with a money-back guarantee. bit.ly/3XFnMoj
Nvidia breached the $5 trillion market cap a few weeks ago, and even after giving back a chunk, it is one of a dozen companies with market caps exceeding a trillion. Overpriced stocks or Business marvels? bit.ly/3Ycei3W
Debates about over pricing quickly devolve into shouting matches between one side that argues that a trillion dollars is too high a price for any company and the other pointing to a changed world order for business. bit.ly/3Ycei3W
Rather than take that path, I use an intrinsic value framework to reverse engineer the revenues that the company will need to generate to break even at its current market cap, hopefully creating the basis for a more business-based debate about value. bit.ly/3Ycei3W
Channeling Greenspan from the 1990s, Jerome Powell described US equities as “fairly highly valued” which may be Fed code for stocks are in a bubble. I wrote this post to examine whether markets are overpriced, and if so, whether action is warranted. bit.ly/4gXOscz
Looking at the first three quarters of 2025, there is a disconnect between the news of economic disruption and costs, and what equity indices in the US have been doing. Markets clearly are at odds with experts and economists. bit.ly/4gXOscz
Taking a deeper dive into US equities, and looking at market performance, by sector, this is a market that has spread its wealth unevenly, with technology and communication services on the upside, and health care and consumer staples lagging. bit.ly/4gXOscz
Imitation may be the best form of flattery, but not if it is used in a scam. In response to an Instagram scam, where I (allegedly) invite people to invest with me, I cycled through surprise, anger and frustration, before settling on curiosity & graded it. bit.ly/4mtKKcg
I start by describing why I leave material on open access (not altruism, but selfishness) and how you can find any content I have created (written, spoken) online on one of four platforms. bit.ly/4mtKKcg
The first is my webpage, where you can find all material related to my teaching (my two regular and four ancillary classes), data (industry averages), spreadsheets/tools, books and papers. bit.ly/4mxqvKR
In the last few years, MicroStrategy has become a Bitcoin SPAC, with investors attributing savant-like status to Michael Saylor. Its success has led some to push companies to shift their cash into bitcoin. As a general principle, this is a bad idea, but there are four carveouts. bit.ly/40TEjXG
The reasons for holding cash vary depending on where a company is in the life cycle from survival for young growth firms to youth serum for mature firms to liquidation manager for declining firms. bit.ly/40TEjXG
For all of these reasons, publicly traded firms held more than $11 trillion in cash as of June 2025; US firms held about $2.5 trillion in cash. Much of that cash is invested in close-to-riskless and liquid investments, earning low returns. bit.ly/40TEjXG
Most investment lessons are directed at long-only investors in publicly traded stocks & bonds, with cash as a buffer. It ignores vast swathes of the investing universe, including private businesses, short strategies & non-traded assets. bit.ly/4l6DOSp
These ignored investments are what comprise the alternative investing universe, and in the last two decades, they have been sold relentlessly to portfolio managers, on the promise that they will yield better risk/return trade offs. bit.ly/4l6DOSp
The first pitch for alternative investing is based on "low" correlations with traded stocks and bonds, where adding them on to a primarily stock/bond portfolio will generate diversification benefits. bit.ly/4l6DOSp