The Monday Read

COP26 Edition

More like COPOUT26, amirite? Very disappointing.

Film

I saw The Laundromat this week. It was trying very much to be The Big Short (which is excellent), but kind of failed to hit the same notes of interest/humour. The main problem is that the story is a bit too big and abstract to work as a short film, so they had to make up a bunch of random characters that we don’t really care about. It was slickly made and watchable, but also forgettable and preachy. 7/10.

The Forum

The Forum is doing well (17,316 posts to date). Here are the latest active threads:

RetireJapan Online Conference (save the date and check your spam folder)

The inaugural RetireJapan online conference will be held on Labor Thanksgiving Day (November 23rd) from 10:00 to 16:00, with a break 12:00-13:00. It will be free and held through Zoom. More details here! Recordings will be made available for people that can’t make it on the day (where possible) but do come and join us if you can.

If you are interested in attending, please make sure you register through the event page as soon as possible. The conference is free, but we may need to limit numbers if we get a lot of interest due to Zoom constraints (we currently have over 350 people signed up to attend!).

We sent an email out on Tuesday (will send another one on the 16th) and some people said it went into their spam folder. Please check and tag it as not spam, etc. if that happened to you.

This week’s books

Been a bit busy so no new books, but I am really enjoying 4000 Weeks (about using our limited time more mindfully), and 100 Baggers (about finding stocks that return 100x what you paid for them).

I figure I am about 2,000 weeks into my life, and my best stock so far is a 13-bagger.

This week’s links

1. Might check this book out: Safe Haven by Mark Spitznagel
2. I like Naval. This is also how I like to work: Work Hard
3. This seems significant. Maybe I should have invested more in Pfizer! Pfizer’s Good News Is the World’s Good News
4. This was Matt Levine on fine form: Elon Musk Did Some Tweets
5. Seems legit: The Way to Wealth (Benjamin Franklin)
6. RJ post from the past: The Three Elements of Money Mastery
7. Interesting write-up of a Brazilian banking startup: A Nu Dawn, A Nu Day
8. Strange times we live in: The 3 Levels of FOMO
9. I’d love to look at this. Someone should digitize it: Jodorowsky’s Dune Book (Christie’s auction)
10. Looking forward to this: FIRE update: six months in
11. This is pretty good! UK based but the basic principles are universal: A Complete Guide To Investing In The Stock Market and Retiring Early
12. Everything you ever wanted to know about the credit card business: How credit cards make money
13. I wish I had read this in 2017 and bought Amazon shares: Why Amazon is eating the world
14. I’m still not completely convinced, but interesting video from The Escape Artist: Owning The Internet: The Bull Case for Crypto 🚀
15. I can see myself doing this in retirement: Is 90% in Stocks Too Much During Retirement?
16. This is very similar to the 4000 Weeks book: Why Emotionally Intelligent People Embrace the Rule of Clocking Out
17. Something nice: Our Daughter’s Birthday / A Brief Post on Adoption in Japan
18. I would love one of these: The Bestselling Magic of the Writing Shed
19. I would like to see this for local elections too: Tokyo suburb to grant voting rights to foreign residents

What do you think? Anything good in there?

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