Noted

Patrick Stewart spent most of his life hating his father. At 72 he read a medical note from 1940 and had to start the man over from the beginning. He grew up in a two-up two-down in Mirfield, Yorkshire. His father was a regimental sergeant major. The violence at home was aimed at his mother, and police came to the house more than once. Stewart was a boy and could do nothing. He has been a patron of Refuge, the domestic violence charity, for years. "I do what I do in my mother's name, because I couldn't help her then," he says. Then he went looking for his father's war record. At the Imperial War Museum he read the notes. In 1940, after France with the British Expeditionary Force, his father was diagnosed with what was then called severe shell shock. Today it is called PTSD. He was never treated for it. It never left him. A doctor told Stewart that every condition of his childhood he had just described was a textbook symptom of an untreated veteran. In the video below, a woman at a convention asks him what he is most proud of outside acting. He answers with this. He now works for Refuge in his mother's name and for Combat Stress in his father's, and says he does both in equal measure. For 70 years his father was the man who did it. He is now also a man it was done to. Is that an explanation, or an excuse that arrived 70 years too late?

Charlie Sheen was paying $55,000 a month to one ex-wife and $55,000 a month to another. In 2018 he told a court his monthly income was $2,426. At his peak on Two and a Half Men he was the highest-paid actor on television, taking in about $613,000 a month. The agreements were written when that was normal. Brooke Mueller's deal set $27,500 per twin until they turned 18, with a clause that her amount could never fall below whatever Denise Richards was getting. On top of the fixed sums, both women take 9.5% of anything he earns above $2.1 million a year. Then CBS fired him in 2011. In March 2016 he filed to cut both payments, listing income down to an average of $87,384 a month. Richards was reduced to $20,000. By 2018 he was back saying he had been blacklisted. Mueller said he was $89,398 behind. Richards said he owed $450,000. A judge had already ordered Warner Bros. to garnish $55,000 a month out of anything it paid him. In the video below, ET goes through the filings from the middle of the fight. The case for Charlie: he agreed to a number, not to a career. The case for the mothers: he set that number when he was the highest-paid man on television, and the children did not get cheaper. He signed the deal at $613,000 a month. He is still bound by it at $2,426. Should a court hold a man to the richest month of his life?

Jack Whittaker won $314.9 million on Christmas night in 2002, the biggest single lottery ticket in American history. He was already a millionaire before he bought it. He ran a construction company in West Virginia. He played the lottery only when the jackpot passed $100 million. He took the cash option and walked away with $113,386,407. Then he started handing it out. His granddaughter Brandi was 17. He gave her $2,000 a week and bought her 4 cars. Asked about it later, he said he was very proud that she had four cars. In the video below, he is asked why. In August 2003 a briefcase with $545,000 in cash was taken from his car outside a club. He said he had been drugged. It was the first of several thefts from his car, his office and his house. Brandi died in 2004, at 17. His daughter died in 2009. His wife left him. In 2016 his house in Virginia burned down and it was not insured. He died in 2020 at 72. "My granddaughter is dead because of the money," he told ABC News in 2007. The case against the money: nothing in his life went wrong until the ticket. The case against the man: he had the same money before, and he handled it fine until everyone could see it. The lottery did not make him rich. It only made him visible. Did the money destroy his family, or did it just show them to everybody?

Howard Hughes died in 1976 with as much as $2.5 billion and no valid will. Weeks later 3 handwritten pages appeared on a desk at the Mormon church in Salt Lake City, leaving 1/16 of the estate, about $156 million, to a gas station owner named Melvin Dummar. Dummar said he had met Hughes once, in December 1967. He said he found a bloodied man lying beside a road in the Nevada desert, drove him almost 3 hours to Las Vegas, and handed him a quarter before he got out. He also said he had no idea where the will came from. Then his fingerprint was found on the envelope. His story changed: a well-dressed stranger had left it at his gas station with instructions to take it to the church. His fingerprint was also found on a library book about forged Hughes documents. The book contained samples of Hughes's handwriting. In the video below, a Las Vegas station lays out how he was denied. On June 8, 1978 a jury deliberated 11 hours and ruled the will a fake. Dummar got $0. He was never charged with anything. He spent the next 40 years delivering frozen meat and telling the same story. A retired FBI agent and one of Hughes's pilots later said parts of it checked out. A judge threw out his last case in 2007. He died in 2018 still saying it happened. He may have told the truth about the desert. He lied about the envelope, and the envelope was the only part a court could measure. Was he a forger, or the unluckiest honest man in America?

Stan Lee co-created Spider-Man, the Hulk and Black Panther. At 95 he was moved out of his own house by his business manager. His wife of 69 years died in July 2017. The fight over his money started almost immediately. By June 2018 Lee had a restraining order against Keya Morgan. Police said Morgan took over his Hollywood Hills home, hired guards to keep relatives and associates away, then moved the 95-year-old into a Beverly Hills condo where, in the words of the case file, Morgan "had more control over Lee." Police also said Morgan pocketed more than $262,000 from autograph sessions Lee did in a single month. Morgan's lawyer said his client never abused or took advantage of Lee. Morgan called the reports fake news. Lee died in November 2018, before any of it was decided. The clip below is him at his Hollywood Walk of Fame star, thanking the crowd for showing up. He spent his life inventing people who rescue other people. At 95 he needed one. Was that elder abuse, or a family fight over a fortune that found a convenient villain?

Brooke Astor died at 105 with an estate of about $180 million. Her only son went to prison for stealing from it. Anthony Marshall ran his mother's money for decades. In 2009 a Manhattan jury convicted him on 14 counts including grand larceny. He was 85 and faced up to 25 years. The most serious count was a $1 million retroactive raise he signed over to himself for managing her finances. Prosecutors said he took art off her walls and had her will changed in her final years, when she had dementia, moving millions away from the libraries, parks and museums she had funded all her life. The case did not start with police. It started with her grandson. Philip Marshall, Anthony's own son, went to court in 2006 and said his grandmother was not being looked after. In the video below, ABC reports the verdict and Philip says why he did it. The case for Anthony: a decorated World War II veteran who had handled her affairs for 30 years. His neighbor Whoopi Goldberg wrote to the judge that jail would be cruelty with no purpose. The case against: the paperwork moved while his mother could no longer read it. He was sentenced to 1 to 3 years. He appealed for 3 years, reported to prison at 89, and walked out on medical parole exactly 2 months later. He died the following year at 90. A settlement cut his inheritance from $31 million to $14.5 million. About $100 million went to her charities. She spent her life giving the money away. He spent 2 months in prison trying to keep it. Was that justice, or just a very expensive way to get nothing?

Anna Nicole Smith was 26 when she married J. Howard Marshall II. He was 89, worth about $1.6 billion, and he died 14 months later. His will left her $0. She said he had promised her half of everything, out loud, many times. "He just always promised me, once we're married, half of everything is mine," she says. He never put it in writing. The sole heir was his 61-year-old son Pierce, who was 35 years older than his own stepmother. In the video below, ABC News lays out how the fight started. She filed for bankruptcy in California and claimed the estate owed her. In December 2000 that court awarded her $474 million. 3 months later a Texas jury, after a 5-month trial, ruled the opposite. The will was valid and she was entitled to nothing. One woman, 2 courts, 2 answers. Dead broke in Texas, a multimillionaire in California. It reached the Supreme Court twice, in 2006 and in 2011. Pierce died in 2006. Anna Nicole died in 2007 at 39. The lawyers kept going without either of them. In 2011 the court ruled the Texas judgment was the one that counted. Her estate received $0. In 2014 a judge threw out its last claim, for $44 million. Everything he promised her was spoken. Everything he left was written. Was she owed the half she says he promised, or only what the paper said?

In July 2022 a company carrying Usain Bolt's name went quiet in at least 8 American cities. It left behind locked e-bikes and scooters and nobody answering the phone. Bolt Mobility launched out of Miami in 2018 with the sprinter as co-founder and the face of the brand. In late 2020 it bought Gotcha Mobility of Charleston and took over its city contracts. Portland, St. Augustine, Richmond in Virginia, Richmond in California and three towns in Vermont were left with equipment they could not unlock. The vehicles only opened through the company's app. Officials emailed. They called. The customer service line was not staffed, and CEO Ignacio Tzoumas could not be reached either. "They've vanished, leaving equipment behind," a Vermont county transport planner told TechCrunch that week. Richmond, California said the company went out of business with no notice and left its equipment where it stood. A separate firm later offered to unlock the abandoned fleet so the cities could use it themselves. Three weeks later the company finally spoke. It said investors had failed to deliver expected fundraising and it had to scale back. The clip below is him unveiling that scooter in Paris, before any of this. Bolt was the name on the vehicles, not the man running them. Three months after the scooters went dark, his retirement account in Kingston still showed $12,758,181.74.

The Blind Side made more than $300 million and won an Oscar. The man it was about says he was never adopted. He had signed a conservatorship. Michael Oher was 18, over the legal age and with no diagnosed disability, when he signed papers in 2004 that he says he was told were adoption papers. They handed Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy control of his contracts and his name for the next 19 years. He says he found out in February 2023. Real footage of him breaking his silence below. The judge who ended it, Kathleen Gomes, said that in 43 years on the bench she had never seen a conservatorship granted over someone who was not disabled. She said it should have ended long ago. The Tuohys say the conservatorship was only a tool to satisfy NCAA rules so he could play at Ole Miss, where Sean had been a star. They say every family member was paid equally from the film, and that Oher received about $138,000 across 10 payments. Oher says the first time he ever heard the words I love you, it was them saying it. He also says that at 18 you let your guard down, and then everything gets stripped from you. A movie about a family giving a boy a home. A document that gave them his signature instead. Did they save him, or sign him?

Leona Helmsley was worth about $4 billion. In 1989 a federal judge sentenced her to four years in prison and told her she had been driven "not by need, but by naked greed." The case was built on expenses. She and her husband had written off personal spending as business costs. The judge called it a sophisticated scheme and said she sat at the apex of it. Four years, plus more than $7 million in fines. One line buried her in public before the verdict did. A servant testified that Helmsley had told her: "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes." In court she wept and called it a nightmare. "I'm more humiliated and ashamed than anyone can imagine," she said. Eighteen years later she died, and her will made the rest of the argument for her. She left $12 million in trust to her Maltese, Trouble, and ordered that the dog be buried beside her. She left $10 million to her brother. She left $5 million each to two grandchildren, but only if they visited their father's grave once every calendar year and signed in to prove it. Two other grandchildren, Craig and Meegan Panzirer, got nothing. The will explains why in seven words: "for reasons which are known to them." Their father was her only son. He died in 1982, and she sued his estate for money she said he owed her. Reports at the time put what his children got from it at $432 each. The case for Leona: it was her money, earned and taxed and hers to give. The case for the grandchildren: she never told them what they had done. In the video below, CBS reports the day the judge handed down the sentence, and you hear the line that followed her to the grave. Was the judge punishing a tax cheat, or punishing a woman the public had already decided to hate?

Almost every measurement of a stock covers a year, or five, or whatever window an index happens to use. Hendrik Bessembinder measured each one over its entire life. Every common stock that has appeared in the American database since 1926. Four out of every seven of them returned less over that lifetime than a one-month Treasury bill. The market still went up, and by a great deal. All of the net gain came from four percent of the companies. The other ninety-six percent, taken together, matched Treasury bills. That is not a fact about stock picking being difficult. It is the shape of the thing the article's first test is asking about. Risk every holder could put down pays nothing, because nobody has to be paid to carry what they could simply spread out. The payment exists for the part nobody can escape. The count says what the part that pays nothing is actually made of. Most of it goes nowhere across an entire corporate lifetime, and the whole return of the market sits inside a sliver that cannot be named in advance. Concentration is a claim to be holding some of the four percent. The median stock in that record did worse over its whole life than a Treasury bill. What it had that the bill did not was a story.

In 1986 Paul Meehl published a paper about a book he had written thirty-two years earlier. The title he picked called it disturbing, and little, and his own. The 1954 book set two ways of predicting a person's behaviour against each other. A trained expert weighing the case, and a formula adding up a handful of scored variables. The formula kept winning. The profession it concerned declined to act on this, and the 1986 paper is Meehl working through why. He went on lecturing at Minnesota for another three years. Those lectures are on video, twelve of them, and almost nobody has watched them. The count was finished in 2000. One hundred and thirty-six studies, drawn from 1945 to 1994, across medicine, psychiatry, personality, education and criminal justice. Mechanical prediction came out about ten percent more accurate on average. It substantially beat the expert in between a third and a half of the studies. The expert substantially beat it in six to sixteen percent. The advantage held regardless of the judgment task, the kind of judge, how much experience that judge had, or what sort of data was being combined. The article runs five investing philosophies as agents and finds the winners were the ones that never departed from their written rules. That is the same result, in a market, seventy years later. Meehl's finding was never that the formula is clever. The formula is not clever. It is only incapable of changing its mind halfway through.

The standard British equity index begins in 1919. Nothing about 1919 makes it a natural year to start counting returns, and that is close to the reason it was chosen. Elroy Dimson has spent twenty-five years assembling the alternative. He named the problem easy data bias, and he rates it the largest of the ones his database had to take out. The series that already existed began where the records became reliable. Britain after one war, Germany after the next, every market starting at the point its own turmoil was over. Impose a common start date instead, the first of January 1900, everywhere, whatever was happening there at the time, and the historical performance of almost every market falls. The Russian and Chinese markets go in at zero. A share that became worthless is still a share somebody was holding, which is how any single stock is treated inside an index. The article files the eight and a half percent United States stocks paid above safe assets since 1900 under puzzle. That figure belongs to the market which then spent the century becoming larger than all the others combined. Dimson's estimate of what equities pay from here is about three percent above bonds. The article arrives at two point six from an entirely different direction. Every long-run return series has a start date, and somebody chose it. The years that got chosen were the ones where the records were good.

in 1999, four physicists in Paris took the empirical correlation matrix that the industry uses to price its risk and showed that ninety-four percent of it was just noise. their tool was random matrix theory. build a correlation matrix out of pure noise and its eigenvalues do not scatter. they fall inside a band with a hard edge, and the edge has a closed form. the band depends on two numbers and nothing else: how many assets are in the matrix, and how many observations went into it. it can be drawn before anyone looks at a single price. 406 stocks from the S&P 500, 1309 trading days, 1991 to 1996. ninety-four percent of the eigenvalues landed inside the band that pure noise would have produced. the six percent standing outside it were the only real structure in the thing. the largest sat about twenty-five times above the edge. that one is the market itself, the risk nobody can put down. this is test three of the article with the arithmetic attached. count the reasons, not the contracts. AIG held thousands of contracts and one reason, and the reason is an eigenvalue. a portfolio does not hold as many bets as it holds positions. it holds as many as clear the edge. the positions were never the diversification. the eigenvalues above the edge were.

The records had been sitting with a large discount broker for years before anyone thought to score them. Sixty-six thousand households, every trade any of them made between 1991 and 1996. Brad Barber and Terrance Odean scored them against the market. The average household earned sixteen point four percent a year. The market returned seventeen point nine. The fifth that traded most earned eleven point four. Same six years, same market, same information reaching everybody at the same time. Getting there took work. The average household replaced three quarters of its portfolio every year. Munger's twelfth tendency is excessive self-regard, and the figure he reaches for is the ninety percent of Swedish drivers who rate themselves above average. That is a survey answer. Nobody was ever billed for it. These households were. Six and a half points a year, charged to the busiest fifth of them across six years, for holding the same opinion in a market rather than on a road. Nothing in those six years told any of them they were wrong. Every confirmation they received said the trade had gone through.

The audience was the finance profession itself. The man at the lectern was its own president, and he spent the hour on what it costs everyone else. Kenneth French, American Finance Association, 2008. He had added up the fees, the expenses, and trading costs Americans pay to hold stocks, then priced the same holdings passively and subtracted one from the other. Averaged over 1980 to 2006 the difference was two thirds of one percent of the entire market's value, every year. Not of the money in active funds. Of the market. Capitalised, he put society's cost of price discovery at a tenth of the market or more. That is the share of the thing spent on finding out what the thing is worth. None of it is a risk premium. A premium is what the world pays somebody for holding what nobody else will hold. This is what one person pays to sit opposite another. Every disagreement is fully staffed on both sides. French's own estimate was that the typical investor would have raised his annual return by sixty-seven basis points across those twenty-seven years by declining to take part. Price discovery is a real service and somebody has to pay for it. The bill comes to a tenth of the market, and no copy of it is ever sent out.

Workers at a mid-sized Midwest plant were asked in 1998 to save more of their paycheck. They said no. They were behind on their bills and there was nothing left to cut. Three and a half years later the same people were saving almost four times as much. Not one of them had agreed to save more out of the money they had. They had agreed to something else. Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler had offered a different contract. Three percentage points more, not now, but out of a raise that had not arrived yet. Nothing left the paycheck anyone was currently living on. Four raises later the group had moved from three and a half percent to thirteen point six. Benartzi lays the mechanism out in the same seventeen minutes. Germany asks drivers to check a box to become an organ donor and twelve percent do it. Austria asks them to check a box to opt out. Ninety-nine percent are donors. Same choice, same continent, one word moved, and almost nobody checks a box. Personal finance treats the savings rate as the purest expression of will, the one number a person fully controls, priced in every subscription and every coffee. The largest documented increase in it was produced by removing the decision from the people making it. They never chose to save more. They chose once not to spend a raise they had not yet received.

A risk you can spread out until it disappears pays nothing. A risk you cannot escape does - that is the whole of the first test in the article this quotes. Wall Street's AI systems just built a risk with nowhere left to spread it. The person who said so on camera used to run the SEC. The clip runs three and a half minutes, titled "Systemic Risk in Artificial Intelligence," posted to the SEC's own channel in September 2024. Gary Gensler skips bias and job loss entirely and goes straight to concentration. He borrows the plot of the film Her. Samantha, the AI voice, talks to thousands of people who each believe the relationship is theirs alone. Then he swaps the movie star for a base model, and the thousands of people for financial institutions — 8,316 of them, in his own hypothetical, all leaning on one signal without knowing how many others lean on it too. The three largest cloud providers are already affiliated with the leading AI model builders. Thousands of downstream trading and lending tools sit on a handful of engines underneath. Different logos, different marketing, often the same one or two models doing the deciding. Run that back through the first test. A risk everyone can escape pays nothing, because nobody has to hold it. A risk nobody can escape, because it is the same model sitting under every desk, does not pay either. It just waits. His own words for what comes next: AI may play a central role in the after-action report of a future financial crisis. He said it as the sitting regulator, not an outside critic. It has thirty-eight likes.

A licensed adjuster can inspect a hurricane-damaged house, write $231,000 of storm damage into his own report, and watch a number six times smaller reach the homeowner's mailbox with no explanation of who changed it or why. That is what happened to a Florida couple, Jeff and Virginia Rapkin, after Hurricane Ian. Their adjuster, Jordan Lee, estimated $231,368.57 in damage. The figure that came back from the insurer was $15,469.48. After the deductible and a public adjuster's fee, the couple received about nine thousand dollars. Lee was not describing a one-off mistake. He told 60 Minutes that of the 46 estimates he wrote, 44 were changed before they reached policyholders. A second adjuster, Ben Mandell, said 18 of his own 20 reports were altered the same way. One estimate went from $488,000 to $13,000. Another went from $239,000 to $3,000. The two adjusters worked for different companies. An attorney representing six whistleblowers says he has found the same pattern in six different states. The policy itself never changed. What changed was a number written after the inspection, by someone the homeowner never met, that quietly decided what the policy was actually worth that year.