Presidents and the Market

I suspect most presidents have less influence over stock market performance than the media suggests. And today – probably more so than at any other time in my life – the performance and health of the largest companies comprising the stock market is not a good measure of the overall health of the economy. But regardless, taking a step back and looking at market movements over multi-year periods can provide a helpful perspective. And so as we near Tuesday’s election, I enjoyed seeing and reflecting on this Axios graphic: I expect many people would look at this and spin it to support the political narrative they want to be true. And some of those narratives are probably right. But I

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My New Photography Portfolio

A few weeks ago I made the leap from maintaining a local photography workflow to a fully cloud-based workflow using Adobe Creative Cloud. As part of this, I uploaded all my 26k archived photos to Creative Cloud and migrated my Lightroom catalog to Adobe’s cloud-based organization system. I was a bit worried the new system might not work well with my shoot-edit-publish workflow, but everything went smoothly, and so far the cloud platform appears to be faster and more intuitive. The AI-based search functionality is amazing, and it also seamlessly integrates all of my iPhone photos with my DSLR shoots, which was a major pain point previously. There are still a few features from Lightroom Classic that have not made

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Under the Hood of the S&P 500 Rebound

There’s been quite a bit of debate about what’s driving the rather unexpected stock market rebound in the midst of a global pandemic (e.g., Fed actions/policies, stimulus, large businesses benefiting at the expense of small businesses, some business models are benefiting from the new norms at the expense of those that don’t, etc.). In my view, it’s probably a bit of each of those, but dominated by the sad fact that a large cross-section of non-public small and medium businesses will not survive, and large public companies that can weather the storm will ultimately be able to fill the supply void, and even buy their assets/IP for pennies on the dollar. Case in point – my dad never used Amazon

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Carne Asada & Chimichurri

I’ve made my favorite steak a few times over the past month, and shared the recipe with a couple friends, which made me realize I might as well just post it here for future reference and sharing. This has basically been borrowed from several other recipes and tweaked until I no longer felt it needed tweaking. The Marinade: 1 jalapeño sliced 4 cloves garlic minced 1/2 cup of spring onions sliced 1/2 cup of fresh cilantro finely chopped 1/3 cup of olive oil 1 orange squeezed 1 lime squeezed 1 lemon squeezed 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar 1 teaspoon ground cumin 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper The Steak: You’ll want to marinate the steak for at least

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Prickly Pear

Last month I purchased a few prickly pear pads, and planted them in a couple small pots in my home office. I’d read that it can take weeks or even months for them to properly root and begin developing new pads. And even though they typically flower in the spring – with fruit following a bit after that – I didn’t expect to have any flowers or fruit this year given the root system won’t be robust until later in the summer. So I was quite surprised when both started growing new pads within a few days of being planted, and one of them flowered by the third week! Here are a few pictures: Still waiting to see if the

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SpaceX ISS Docking Simulator

I’ve been following SpaceX closely for a while now, and continue to be excited about the innovation we’ll see from a growing and competitive private space sector. I still watch nearly all their rocket launches live, and remember getting goosebumps when they landed a first stage for the first time in history on December 21st, 2015. For that one, I was in Thailand with my wife, and she thought I was completely nuts to plan our morning around watching a live rocket launch (it was actually quite convenient with the time difference, at around 9:30am). I’d watched all the previous failures (calibration exercises?), and until they succeeded, many didn’t think it was possible. Next week will hopefully be an exciting

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Goodbye Southie!

13 years ago I made what seemed like a questionable decision and moved to South Boston with a good friend. I was single and working at Fidelity Investments in my first job out of college. Before moving here I hadn’t spent more than a couple days in the area, and knew little about it other than (1) the location was great, (2) the area was nice, albeit a bit rough around the edges, and (3) it had a really bad repuation. I’ve spent the last 13 years in this neighborhood, living in three different houses. And it’s been awesome. Over that time, I went to grad school, started this website, got a new job, got married, and had two kids.

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A few thoughts after being remotely diagnosed with COVID-19

This past Sunday I woke up and did not feel well. I had a slight headache, some body aches, and was generally tired. I went about my morning routine with the kids, and within half an hour my headache was worse, and I developed cold chills and a mild dry cough. When I took a deep breath, I felt a bit of pressure in my chest. My wife and I quickly arranged for me to be isolated in our basement, and I got in bed and took my temperature, which was 102° F. On paper, I had most of the COVID-19 symptoms, so I called my primary care doctor’s office, and was routed to MGH’s COVID-19 line. I went through

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State by State Coronavirus Tracking

I finally found a great resource for tracking state by state trends to better understand which are successfully “flattening the curve” and which are not. The site is called 91-DIVOC and is updated several times per day with 4 charts: Cases by Country Cases by US State Cases by Country, Normalized by Population Cases by State, Normalized by Population In each of the 4 charts, you can toggle to view any of 5 metrics: active cases, confirmed cases, new cases / day, deaths, and recoveries. You can also jump between linear and log scales. There are the typical caveats that the charts are only as good as the data quality, and data quality varies significantly based on country/state reporting practices

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Good Data on the Coronavirus

As things have escalated quickly, I’ve found several resources that provide extremely valuable data and perspectives. The first is this article on Medium by Tomas Pueyo. Everyone should read this, and he’s helpfully had it translated into 26 languages. It’s the single best synthesis I’ve seen of everything going on. He starts with this summary: When you’re done reading the article, this is what you’ll take away:The coronavirus is coming to you.It’s coming at an exponential speed: gradually, and then suddenly.It’s a matter of days. Maybe a week or two.When it does, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed.Your fellow citizens will be treated in the hallways.Exhausted healthcare workers will break down. Some will die.They will have to decide which patient

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