Writing
Posts on things I've worked through and wanted to explain properly.
2026
BBD and Tax Loopholes
26 September 2026 · 6 min read
How the ultra-wealthy use Buy, Borrow, Die to grow their fortunes while paying almost no tax: borrowing against appreciating assets instead of selling, then passing them on with a stepped-up basis.
- Finance
- Billionaires
- Economics
- +1
Stock Market Crash
19 September 2026 · 4 min read
What actually causes a stock market crash, from recessions and inflation to bubbles and panic selling, and the indicators that tend to show up before one.
- Recession
- Finance
- Stock Market Crash
- +2
Game Theory: Backward Induction and the Endgame Problem
19 September 2026 · 2 min read
Reasoning backwards from the last move, and why cooperation collapses all at once the moment players know exactly when a repeated game ends.
- Strategy
- Game Theory
- Human Behavior
Bonds and Debentures
18 September 2026 · 5 min read
How bonds and debentures work: face value, coupons, maturity, premiums and discounts, and how the two differ in security, risk and liquidity.
- Finance
- Money
- Investing
Game Theory: Tit-for-tat
8 September 2026 · 2 min read
Why repeating the Prisoner's Dilemma changes everything, and how a simple strategy, cooperating first and then copying your opponent, makes cooperation last.
- Strategic Thinking
- Cooperation
- Game Theory
- +1
Freeports and Wealth Tricks
8 September 2026 · 4 min read
Tax-free warehouses in Geneva, Luxembourg and Singapore where art, gold and wine sit legally "in transit", and how billionaires use them for tax avoidance and secrecy.
- Tax Avoidance
- Billionaires
- Strategy
- +2
Data Warehousing, from OLTP to the Modern Cloud Stack
1 September 2026 · 16 min read
A study guide built in three days with Claude, NotebookLM, ChatGPT and Perplexity: OLTP vs OLAP, star and snowflake schemas, fact and dimension types, grain, surrogate keys, SCDs, data marts, and why ELT won.
- Data Warehousing
- ETL
- OLAP
- +2
PySpark for Data Engineers: The Docs, Distilled
30 August 2026 · 11 min read
I read the entire PySpark documentation so you don't have to. The parts that matter for data engineering: DataFrames, types, cleaning, transformations, joins, file formats and ANSI mode.
- PySpark
- Apache Spark
- Databricks
- +1
PE and PB Ratio
24 August 2026 · 3 min read
Using price-to-earnings and price-to-book ratios to judge whether a stock is overvalued or undervalued, and what a low or high ratio can really mean.
- Investing
- Finance
- Stocks
- +1
Game Theory: Nash Equilibrium
19 August 2026 · 2 min read
The central idea of game theory: a state where no player can do better by changing only their own strategy, and why every finite game has one.
- Game Theory
- Strategy
- Human Behavior
- +1
Game Theory: Prisoner's Dilemma
14 August 2026 · 3 min read
The most famous scenario in game theory, and the gap it exposes between what is best for an individual and what is best for the group.
- Game Theory
- Cooperation
- Human Behavior
- +1
NPV and IRR
13 August 2026 · 3 min read
Net Present Value and Internal Rate of Return, built on the time value of money: discounting future cash flows to decide whether an investment is worth it.
- Money
- Corporate Finance
- Budgeting
- +1