Footnotes

* I have to use the language we have and not the language Cullen wants so please excuse me if I use the word “investing” in its more common usage at times in this text.

* Just kidding. Your father does not exist to choose your spouse for you. He exists primarily to carry heavy things, eat your leftovers, break down cardboard boxes that arrive from Amazon, and intimidate potential suitors before your high school prom.

* The letters are compiled here for reference: www.pragcap.com/warren-buffett-partnership-letters.

* We won’t talk about how Goldilocks dies in the earliest versions of this story.

* The Efficient Market Hypothesis is the idea that financial markets are “informationally efficient,” meaning asset prices already reflect all publicly available information. As a result, “beating the market” through stock picking or market timing is extremely difficult. Under this premise, the best investment strategy is to just own the market through low-cost index funds (or the GFAP).

* This footnote exists only to test whether my wife actually reads this far into the book. I have 2:1 odds she does not. Wish me luck with this bet.

* Yeah, yeah, of course I kind of knew what happened here, but if you’d held a gun to my head and asked me to guess the returns I would have never guessed it performed better than the US market and global stocks by this degree.

* This is currently undergoing significant debate with most of the pushback coming from my wife, who claims I am a bad driver and even worse listener. In my defense I would argue that I have mastered the art of selective listening. And I haven’t had a moving violation in over 20 years so the driving claim is just BS.

* Larry Summers wrote a good paper in 1985 discussing gold and Gibson’s paradox, and gold’s tendency to correlate with real interest rates over time. Robert B. Barsky and Lawrence H. Summers, “Gibson’s Paradox and The Gold Standard,” NBER Working Paper Series (August 1985).

* Barbells are also great for leg day.

* For those interested, you can find more details on the “Your Perfect Portfolio” page at www.ria.disciplinefunds.com/your-perfect-portfolio.

* This data on credit spreads is publicly available, such as via the St. Louis Fed’s FRED website (fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BAMLH0A3HYC).

* The Updated No-Brainer Portfolio is based on Bill’s work, but he endorses much more customized approaches in his own work.

* Things that make me happier include leg day, triple fudge brownies, and “warm hugs” from my daughters. If you have young kids who watch Frozen all day you know what I mean.

* I kid. Chuck Norris was just a paid spokesperson for a firm my father was involved in litigation with. And Chuck only lost to Bruce Lee in a movie, but none of this diminishes the amazingness of my dad.

* I always knew I was destined to be surrounded by chicks at some point in my life. I just didn’t think it would be literal chicken chicks.

* To be clear, the crying wasn’t due to the newborn baby or Covid, but entirely due to my mother-in-law being trapped with us.

* I would argue that any time T-bills are generating a real return (current yield > than the current rate of inflation) then they are sufficient insurance alternatives in a portfolio.

* For the kids in the crowd – the White Pages was a book filled with people’s phone numbers.

* This section is left blank because there’s nothing to say about these things since they’re terrible.