We Have Hot Water! November 22, 2013November 25, 2024 Jeff H.: “I’ve heard you talk often about our level of happiness and our failure to recognize that we have good lives. This article in The Atlantic helps explain why that is.” ☞ It’s not enough to think positively, the author reports (though that never hurts); you have to learn to savor the good stuff. Which if you can just imagine yourself to have been living for tens of thousands of years in caves, as our ancestors did, with neither wifi nor hot water, is not so difficult to do. LESS AND I MAKE A BET Last week one of you asked about the liquidation of the Formula Funds and “Who wins the bet between you and Less Antman?” To new-ish readers of this column, and/or those with no interest in mutual funds, this is all inside baseball. Don’t bother reading any further. But I did promise to ask Less to do the math, and — gracious and brilliant as ever — he did: “The bet has gotten complicated with the closing of funds, the need to clone replacement data, and the differing geographical areas of the various funds,” he reports, “but I’m happy to note that: (1) My choices have performed in line with my expectation for alternative indexing in general, beating market-weighted benchmarks by around 1.5% per year; (2) Joel’s funds have done even better overall, adding another 1.8% per year, and (3) Anybody who draws a conclusion based on less than 3 years is out of his or her mind, since as recently as last year both Joel’s funds and my suggested alternatives were trailing index returns. So you’re ahead at the moment, but I am by no means despondent about my chances before the next edition comes out.” ☞ Which will be years from now, so don’t wait: click here to see how you, too, may be able to do better than market-weighted index funds, and so I can afford the airfare back from Nanjing. Have a great weekend.