Incentives

The first time I visited New York I was taken in a sidewalk shell-game within 45 minutes of being in the city—no kidding.  Shell games involve trying to guess where a card or any other item might reside after being shuffled among various covers by a dealer.

There are basically three reasons why I lost $40 within 45 minutes of arriving in NYC: 1) I was naïve; 2) I was overconfident in my card-spotting abilities, and; 3) there was a large amount of asymmetric information—in other words, the “dealers” (to use a polite term) had a heck of...

There is a key point of distinction that exists in the world of financial advice and vast majority of people are unaware that it exists. 

The defining issue is whether a...