On rereading the book, I finally realized: “One hundred years of solitude” is about solitude. And about a hundred years, yes. Duh. No, seriously. Every character was lonely in his or her own way. José Arcadio Buendía in his mostly fruitless “scientific” pursuits, and later, already tied to the chestnut tree, endlessly walking through imaginary rooms; Colonel Aureliano Buendía in his 20-year war against the Conservatives (conservative investors?) and later making and selling little gold fish… all of them. ...

Renting out an apartment in real life. — Are we going to insure the apartment? — Oh, no, why? Everything will be fine. Why burn extra money? — The tenants asked us to buy a kettle, and they say the washing machine broke. — What are they, children? Let them go to the store and buy themselves a new kettle! Give them money? Yeah, right! They’ll survive. The rent is ridiculous as it is. ...

“Financial adviser investments from 30 percent a year.” A Yandex search query that, on a fine Sunday, brought someone from the glorious city of Vladivostok to my website for a whole 6 minutes and 31 seconds. Who are you people? And why not 130? Aim higher.

This book could’ve ended in Part Two instead of dragging on to five. Jean Valjean takes Cosette in, that weird bearded guy goes to the galleys, Javert gets fired to hell for filing a false report against His Honor the Mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. And they lived happily ever after, forever and ever. Amen. There you go, my shorter, optimistic version of “Les Misérables”. Unfair, yes. But sending a man to the galleys for 19 years without trial or investigation… for what?! For one lousy loaf of bread that the unfortunate but hardworking man, mind you, stole from somebody only because some monstrous combination of circumstances had left him, desperate, with no other way to feed his family — is that fair? Though if memory serves, he was originally sentenced to 7 years, and got another two sets of six later for escape attempts. ...

10% in investments and 10% in the real economy are two completely different 10%s. You feel this especially strongly in an intangible, information business like mine. Look. If we buy a stock for, say, a million and it goes up 10%, we sell it, get our million back + 100 000, and everything seems fine. Sure, there may be some volatility, but if you do everything right — not critical. But say I pay for advertising and build an audience in some messenger app, travel on a business trip for negotiations, pay for education or membership in professional associations, pay employees, and so on — and invest the same million. All of those are important and necessary expenses without which the business clearly isn’t going anywhere. But now, to make the same 10%, I actually need to make 110%: get the money I spent back and then another 100 000 on top. I can’t exactly sell a diploma or a used plane ticket. In other words, investments in securities are much less risky at the same return. Maybe a “product” business is easier in that sense. But even then you’ll have “intangibles": shipping, storage, certification, payroll. And the goods themselves are illiquid — you can’t quickly sell them at the price you want… ...

Strange thing. Hard to figure out. Every financial adviser defends their product to the bitter end. There are IPO fans who, according to them, invest, make lots and lots of money, and everything is great. There are manufacturers of structured notes who also invest, also make money, and everything is great for them too. There are advisers selling endowment life insurance, investment life insurance, ULIPs — and everything is great with them. There’s me with my conservative stocks and bonds — and everything is great with me. There are passive investors, fans of discretionary asset management and hedge funds — and everything is great with them. There are venture investors; advisers selling income-producing real estate in different countries around the world; people who recommend nothing but gold bars; rare connoisseurs of fine art; crypto believers… you name it. And damn it, everyone is doing great! Just some weird people keep buying U.S. government debt at 1% a year when they could hand the money to an asset manager at 300%. Pure matter of taste. No difference whatsoever. Apparently. ...

I have a question. You’re an entrepreneur and you want to become an investor. You meet two analysts. One recommends buying shares of “Company A.” In his presentation, he refers to the results of basic fundamental and technical analysis, explaining everything in fairly simple language that any reasonable person can understand. The analyst shows you, say, that the business is sufficiently profitable, its debt load is acceptable, talks about management and the long-term development strategy it has adopted — all of that is familiar and understandable to you as an owner/manager. The analyst assumes the market’s current undervaluation of the business is temporary, and that as long as the sky doesn’t fall, the positive trend will continue. And if it doesn’t, we’ll notice this and sell the stock before it leads us to catastrophic losses. Something like that. The second analyst tells you at the meeting that for the past ten days he has been sweating over his all-encompassing mathematical model. He analyzed in detail not only the company’s own financial statements, but those of every issuer in the sector, plus comparable companies on both this exchange and neighboring ones. He decided not to stop there and took into account the macroeconomic backdrop, the social and geopolitical situation in the country, calculated a polynomial regression of changes in the population of Mars, its correlation with the birth rate of penguins in Antarctica and weekly returns of the S&P 500 over the past 50 years. For reliability, the model was adjusted for phases of the Moon, water temperature off the coast of Peru, the volatility of frozen orange juice futures, average annual buckwheat consumption in Eastern European countries, and the number of times Fed chairs used the word “recession” in speeches. Then he ran a Granger causality test between solar activity and the company’s EBITDA, checked the statistical significance of the distance from the issuer’s headquarters to the nearest McDonald’s and, finally, ran a 100000-scenario Monte Carlo simulation adjusted for geomagnetic storms, Atlantic salmon migration, and the groundhog’s mood on Groundhog Day — on the basis of which he concluded that shares of “Company B” should be bought. Suppose you bought both companies and a year later each was up, say, 8%. Which analyst would you keep working with? ...

And who said entrepreneurship = wealth? Where did that belief even come from? Everyone with a regular job seems to think they’re the only ones working, while entrepreneurs do nothing but lie on loungers under palm trees counting zeroes (poor things, exhausted already), sipping piña coladas. Nope. That’s what shareholders do, and maybe some lenders. Entrepreneurs are workhorses. They bust their asses from morning till night trying to make at least something for their benefactors. Because God forbid Uncle Capitalist comes along, calculates EBITDA, frowns, smacks his lips, and poof — no more business for the entrepreneur. That’s the thing. Small business or multinational corporation, financially an entrepreneur has only three jobs: find an interesting idea that will “definitely take off”; raise financing (debt or equity); and, importantly, return that money with a profit. As a reward for all that valiant labor, you may even get to keep a small piece of the cash flow or a couple percentage points of equity. Thank you. In effect, entrepreneurship is discretionary capital management, just in the real economy. And where’s the wealth in that? Right, there isn’t any. Wealth — or at least its material part — is capital. And capital has to be built. Yes, correct, then you’ll have to manage it too. Which also comes with certain risks: hand your money over to some freshly minted hustle-bro, and kiss it goodbye. Still, being a capitalist is better, don’t you think? Build capital. Manage capital. ...

Beat the S&P 500? Why? I run my business and make some money. Other people around me run other businesses and make some money too. Maybe more. So what am I supposed to do now? Try to make more than they do? Why? I have capital, I manage it, and I live on passive income. And then there are Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. So what? Am I supposed to get depressed and hang myself over the thought that I won’t make that much money in 33 lifetimes? I’m driving down the road. Staying in my lane, minding my own business. Someone passes me, then someone else. So what? Do I have to be the fastest person on the road? Why? I’m driving at my own speed and I’m fine. My goal is to get from point A to point B. Comfortably. More than that, with rare exceptions, driving itself is secondary — I have something to do at point B, and I got in the car so I could get it done faster. I could go on. Personal financial planning helps you understand what speed feels comfortable for you in the market and where you’re actually going in the first place. Your life circumstances, your goals (and the goals of your family members, if you have a family — and those goals can be very different), your attitude toward risk — that’s what really matters! You hardly want to be in the market just for the sake of being in the market. Quite a place. No, of course, if your goal is to beat the S&P 500, we can do that. It’s not especially difficult, really. ...