Why not just buy 30-year bonds at 6%?

Someone on Reddit asked the question that a lot of people are quietly thinking. If a 4% withdrawal rate is supposed to be safe for retirement, and a 30-year government bond pays around 6%, why bother with stocks at all? Just buy the bond, collect 6% forever, and skip

Is it too late to invest at all-time highs?

You have money to invest. You open the app, look at the chart, and see a line that has gone almost straight up. The S&P 500 closed at 7,652.86 on 24 August 2026, a rounding error away from its own record. Some part of your brain

The $40 trillion in your mortgage

Washington borrowed its way past a round number this week, and the bill arrived in European bond markets. Plus: what one quarter of AI spending actually costs a shareholder.

The $1.42 trillion IOU behind the rally

Record borrowing is fuelling the market, the AI boom is quietly financing itself, and a struck-down tariff bill is now trading at a discount. Three numbers, and what they mean for your money

23,000 jobs gone. Stocks hit a record

Why a shrinking job market and a record-high stock market are the same story - plus the EUR 100 trick that beats every hot tip.

Ten stocks, 37% of your index

Europe just built a single price feed for your ETFs, Mexico quietly out-exported its own car industry, and a head-start calculation worth EUR 421,000. This week's letter.

A diamond is forever. De Beers wasn't

De Beers spent 130 years convincing the world a diamond never loses its value. In July 2026, the company itself sold for less than the price of a new mine shaft.

The 0.05% that pays you EUR 8,130

A fee cut you did nothing to earn, a record quarter that burned through a billion, and a chart that makes the phrase \"euro-area debt\" fall apart.

Netflix grew 13%. Viewing grew 2%

The gap between those two numbers is the entire business model. Plus: what 3.5% inflation quietly charges a $10,000 balance, and why "the European housing market" describes almost nobody.

The IPO trap: why 'Getting in on the ground floor' usually means getting trampled

On May 18, 2012, Facebook went public in the most anticipated IPO in a decade. Retail investors - regular people with brokerage accounts - snapped up 26% of the shares offered. What those regular people didn't know was that Facebook had quietly told its largest institutional investors that second-quarter

I wrote the personal finance book I needed at 22

My parents never bought a stock. School taught me the Pythagorean theorem and nothing about money. So I read hundreds of finance books - and ended up writing the one I wish someone had handed me at 22.

Barbarians at the gate: how to buy a $25 Billion company with almost none of your own money

In October 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. You probably remember the headlines. What you might not remember is the fine print: Musk borrowed $13 billion of that money. But he didn't get stuck with the loan. Twitter did. Not Elon. The company itself had to