NoLasagna

Risk has been on my mind lately, so I thought I'd talk about it. The context of this risk is based on risk within an investment portfolio. My viewpoint has evolved with in my own life where I had a significant change in my risk profile and didn't really pick up on that fact.  The whole point of limiting risk in a portfolio is the idea of hedging against the mental side of the game and also the financial side you may face. The financial situation is obvious, but mentally it is hard. Seeing a portfolio drop by 50% or swing wildly day to day is tough on the head. You may not sleep at night, worried sick, thinking about it. I think the hardest aspect of risk assessing is that it is hard to tell where you'll be mentally when things really hit the fan. How do you really know how you'll be on that day when things get bad? I suppose there are lessons to be learned. I want to share some of the lessons I've learned over the last year when it comes to risk. Risk is the summati

  I've been following the UCP leader campaign here in Alberta with great interest. There has been a very anti-Kenney sentiment in the air around here, in particular with Kenney's top down party style, the lack of pushing back at Ottawa and over COVID restrictions/vaccine passports.  Brian Jean lost to Kenney and it looks like he lost because he was politically outmaneuvered - rather than a battle of ideas. He's obviously sour and was on the anti-Kenney train ever since. Let's just say that I was a bit excited that he's back. I wanted to see what he had to prove and that he may have some fire in him. The problem I have had with conservatives as of late is them being milquetoast. All that means is that they're very safe, very center and literally bring nothing to the table. Even though conservatives in CANADA say there are many things that need to change, they don't actually do anything all that different than the governing left. Maybe not as bad, but it all s

  Energy is life. If you were to speak with the average person about energy, they probably wouldn't have much to say about the topic. They would probably parrot the same lines of the dominant orthodoxy in society. Energy is the most vitally important component of modern human life and flourishing. If you go back just a few hundred years, humans mainly did farming. Maybe ' mainly' is a bad term. 97% of humans were involved in farming. That work was manual labor. Humans pumped out children, just to have more humans to work on the farm and save on a laborer. Life was tough. Long hours. Dead broke by today's standards and hoping the crops you produce will feed you through the winter. Contrast that scenario with today. Agriculture was once 97% of the economy and it is a mere 3% today. People work less hours and are vastly richer. Work today doesn't have to be manual labor from dusk to dawn 7 days a week. I'm currently working on a computer, producing intellectual ex

I'm trying to post more personal things to this blog and I thought after what I finished watching last night - this was a good post to start. I often think that there is something wrong with me; like a horrible cynic. I like to watch entertaining movies and television, but everything I find lately is just awful. And it's almost like this never-ending cycle of bad to worse. It's not like I'm just watching straight to video movies or anything, I'm watching highly awarded and often praised as the hot thing on Netflix. Last night I watched The Power of the Dog (2021) . A highly regarded movie with a lot of nominations for various awards and I've heard a lot of talk about it - so I watch it. I don't want to spoil the movie for you, but absolutely nothing happens in this movie. There is a point in a movie where you just keep watching to see if anything happens and determine what exactly your time accomplished. Well, I can let you know that watching to the end will

 I haven't been writing a lot lately on this blog, but I felt the need to sign in and write about this. I've found myself feeling a bit depressed about the invasion of Ukraine - not because it happened, but due to how the west will predictably react to it. There will be a lot of talk, strong words, and even stronger rhetoric, but when the actual words become policy - it will be pathetically weak. There are people out there that seem to think or at least try to force the narrative of a simple dichotomy: either we accept Putin is doing it or it's WW3. Any normal person would find the choices here to be nauseating either way. If history is to serve a lesson, the first option often leads to the second option. But this dichotomy really illustrates the parameter that most people don't pick up on. The West is Morally Weak The facts are on the ground. The United States has the largest armed forces in human existence. A coalition of western powers is devastatingly more powerful

 The energy market is going to be something that will be on people's minds for a long time because right now there is very poor policy and ideological views driving us to a crisis. There has been a nice little bull run going on over the last few months, and this may not be the crisis. It's something that may immerge here, but it might be 5-10 years from now. For the longest time I've been a passive index investor , and I still am for a nice chunk of my portfolio, but over the last 18 months I've decided that I'm going to apply my own judgment to the market place and invest accordingly. Over this time I've accumulated a pretty sizeable portfolio of LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) companies, in particular upstream and midstream companies. Renewable Energy or Green Energy are Unreliables There is a political push for green energy. It's driven by the moral ideas that green energy is this universally good  energy and all the other reliable energies we use like fossil