I started compiling notes on finance stuff about 4 years ago. I lurked on Twitter to learn. Weighing arguments, curating reliable sources. All in service of building a coherent tree trunk of knowledge that I could branch from. On one hand, it was chasing adjacent knowledge from my native option trading background. But it was also practical. How I can learn to manage our own money better?
About 2 years ago on a trip to Vancouver with college friends, I wrote a short essay on the flight. I showed it to my friends and they affirmed it reflected how they felt about money. They encouraged me to write and share. The essay is called Does This Sound Like You?
Since then it has been my intention to consolidate and create some flow around my learning so I could share it publically. The newsletter and blog show bits and pieces but I’ve wanted to create a more coherent wiki. A more polished version of my personal wiki.
With some encouragement and guidance from my friend Khe, I’m building a public version in Notion (Khe is a Jedi btw, if you are trying to level up your productivity you need to hit him up). It will be a reference filtered by what I think matters. It will have relevance for households as well as institutions. I have no clue how long it will take to port it all in a consumable way (there’s a lot of content) but I’ll prioritize expediency. As a wiki, it’s a living document anyway.
I have 2 overarching beliefs that are neatly reflected in how my private wiki is organized.
1. Human capital is your most important capital.
This is most obvious when you are young. We don’t worry when a 23-year-old dentist has $150k in debt because it’s backed by human capital. This wiki will include all my explorations for improving how I think. It will include the self-help stuff that has worked for me. I expect this section of the wiki will be published second. It’s more fun but also more speculative.
2. Financial capital should be governed by process
- Get a basic understanding of levers. Basic does not have to mean naive. That’s why I wanted to do this project.
- Implement a framework.
- Meta-tweaks: decide the conditions under which you will make tweaks. Because the ultimate goal is to get on with your life. Not keep tinkering with your investments (unless that’s what you like doing).
Your money is in service of you. Not the other way around.
A Brief Intro to The Moontower Money Wiki
The wiki is initialized and you can see the headings that will be populated at least to start. There will be branches of topics and subtopics. (Link)
Continuing from last week, the first entry is Defining the Problem which includes the retirement model. I think that’s a good starting point because that exercise is like a diagnostic on not just your situation, but your understanding of the problem.
Putting this together has been a long-overdue project. I hope you find it useful and I’m gracious I have many smart readers that can give feedback which in turn helps out the other readers. 95% of all the content and work belongs to others, I’m just acting like a GC on a construction project. I hope it’s worthy of the efforts that inspired it.
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This is an awesome project, I’ve been lurking on vol twitter recently learning about market microstructure and have lurked for a couple years on reddit and bogleheads and been extremely dissatisfied with the lack of depth when it comes to analyzing investing frameworks.
Definitely share the same thoughts when it comes to time-efficiency and spending time on human capital vs investing process. I understand my personal interest in the markets is not capital-efficient but I aspire to communicate my learnings to elevate the investment discussions that come up with family, friends and at work which motivates my continued learning.