What factors influence house prices? This is a perennial topic of dinner party discussion, but the standard of the debate rarely rises above offering anecdotal evidence. Frustrated with the status quo, I decided to tackle the question with statistics. In this post I look at which macroeconomic factors are associated with future house price rises or falls.

One reason to believe that Bitcoin is a poor investment is because it is a rather volatile asset. As a general rule, “lottery like” assets with high variance in their valuations are known to underperform low-risk equivalents:

Do children make you happy? This is a question that anyone who is considering starting a family should be asking themselves. Among my peers there is a widespread assumption that children are a key ingredient in a happy middle age, but it’s never been clear to me that this is so.

Cryptocurrency trading is a high-risk business, with annualized volatility of many tokens exceeding 100%. While I think that every investor should hold some Bitcoin (as part of holding the CAPM market portfolio), it’s probably unwise to commit more than a few percentage points of your net worth.

In my last post I discussed the methods that a UK individual could use to make investments. There were plenty of different methods, all with their own unique tradeoffs.