Joshua Go

As they are, things are pretty good for everyday investors on Main Street. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission makes the filings of public companies readily available on its website. If someone were interested in researching a company thoroughly, pretty much all the information is there: how much debt a company is carrying around, what kind of revenues it's pulling in, what the company's assets are worth, and so on. So, things are pretty good, but they could be a lot better. Now, I say "investors" and not "traders" because traders will typically need more than just information from the SEC. It's also a clear distinction that will limit the scope of the project I'm about to propose so that it's very clear what will be needed (and, more importantly, what will not). The current situation All this data is in HTML. It's great for human readability. Right now, that's exactly what everyone's doing: reading them one by one a...

One of the recurring struggles among people who are part of the evangelical Christian tradition is finding the balance between faith and good works — knowing where each of them fits in and what they're for. Since I've been trying to read three chapters of the Bible every morning to get my bearings before jumping into what are typically full days, I read over something that reminded me of this. Now, the "full days" have been dedicated to learning about stock market investing and exploring various angles for the individual investor to take when selecting stocks. The price of a company's stock takes thousands of factors into account. One way to split up these factors is to consider 1) the book value or intrinsic worth of the company, and 2) the other things like projected growth, macro-economic concerns, takeover speculation, and a host of other factors that are not directly tied in to the numbers that the company is posting. The stocks of most healthy companies will...

As much as we value liberty and tout the virtues of living in a free society, I humbly submit that eternal vigilance is not the only price we pay for our freedom. Anywhere there's freedom, you will find disorder, inconvenience, and shabbiness. We allow our freedoms to be restricted because we want some sort of orderliness, convenience, or good aesthetics. These are good things, but conceding to rigidity often means losing substance or meaning. Take homeowners' associations, for example. With pretty much any HOA, you cannot get away with painting your house bright pink, letting the weeds grow to four feet in your front yard, and then parking your car among the weeds. It may be how you prefer to live your life and run your household, but by joining the HOA you are giving up freedoms that you would otherwise have, in exchange for the assurance that your neighbor across the street will not paint his house a loud pastel purple, because pink is okay but purple is not. You may be fine...