Luck versus skill (FIGJAM) Too many of us have a natural tendency to believe that we've achieved everything through our own hard graft. It's all too easy to downplay the fortunate aspects of our circumstances (in my case, for example, being born in a developed country, to well-educated parents, who… full article

Monte Carlo Grand Prix It's nearly that festive time of year again when the economic soothsayers will be out in force to make their 2020 predictions! A genuine model of outcomes for next year might run through a Monte Carlo simulation, using a range of different variables and probabilities to… full article

The black drop I'm not a boozer these days, but in my early twenties there was never any need to ask me what drink I wanted for the next round...it was always a pint of Guinness, no questions asked! Lots of trendy new ales came and went, as did various… full article

Toughen up! When I was a teenager I worked for some years in a timber factory, and the older fellas had hands like you wouldn't believe. While new hires would invariably see their hands shredded with cuts and splinters, over time and as their hands repaired the body would overcompensate… full article

Toxic and trusting teams We've all come across or had to work with toxic team members or co-workers; perhaps we've even been one ourselves when we were in the wrong role! There are basically only two ways to give people the opportunity to change through direct & honest feedback -… full article

Reaping what you sow My wife hails from a farming family, and has always been conscious of the need to survive the lean years which agriculture tends to throw up periodically. Growing up on the farm, there were some years where the inclement British weather didn't allow for a productive… full article

You're not the user Andrew Carnegie once said that the older he got the more he watched what people did rather than what they said. Apply this to your property investment plans: while a lot of us say we like the idea of moving to acreage in regional areas to… full article

Spurious precision One of the big accounting firms got my goat this week when it released house price growth forecasts by capital city out until the end of the year 2021, predicted to one decimal place. Even if you could predict the future of housing markets beyond a decimal point… full article

Extreme outcomes In his ground-breaking book Thinking Fast and Slow psychologist Daniel Kahneman invited the reader to consider why some small, rural, Republican towns in America's South, West, and Midwest might've recorded the highest rates of kidney cancer (perhaps due to the clean-living rural lifestyle, lack of pollution, and access to fresh… full article

Making the weight For the first year after my daughter was born I became lost in a maze of statistics. Doctors recognise that children come along in all shapes & sizes, but when looking at the 'normal' distribution of baby weights, she was an outlier - consistently lower than she… full article