Some things and ideas: April 2025

My monthly overview (Monthly recurring piece)

• I consider YAVB my “empire” with four core pieces: this blog / substack (the free side), the premium side of this blog, my podcast (also on Spotify, iTunes, or YouTube), and my twitter account. You can see my 2025 vision and goals for the empire here. If you like the blog / free site, I'd encourage you to check out the pod, follow me on twitter, and maybe even subscribe to the premium site!

• A bonus note: I get asked from lots of people about how to break into the finance industry. I detailed it more here, but my top advice would be to go out and start a substack (substack recently gave me a referral code if you start one; if you use that, awesome! But I’ve been recommending starting a substack long before they offered referrals!). If you do launch a substack, please let me know so I can try to be helpful.

I’m disappointed in you, dear reader

• If you're a long time reader of this blog, you know I love escape rooms. I’ve done over a hundred rooms (and escaped all but two!), and I actually proposed to my wife through one. So I'm honestly a little disappointed that only two readers emailed me this article on the Property Brothers that mentions they’ve done hundreds of escape rooms…. and I’d also very much like to get in on their super nerd escape room google doc.

Fintwit Book Club

• My friend Byrne Hobart (from the Diff) and I did our monthly book club. We released March’s right at the start of April (on Diary of a Very Bad Year); benefit of hindsight, that timing was hilarious because things got a whole heck of a lot worse in the next few days. April’s book is Clashing Over Commerce; we recorded the episode earlier this week and it should be out in the next few days. The book was an absolutely fascinating (if long!) look into tariffs; the funny thing is I read the book and alternated between feeling much better about our tariff set up (because we as a nation have been here before) and much worse (because we haven’t been here in 100 years), and I think Byrne felt the same. Fascinating book and fascinating conversation; I’m looking forward to posting it!

• We’re always looking for recommendations on new books for upcoming months; if you have any ideas or suggestions, please hit me up!

Fitness

• Mentioned this last month (and the months prior!), but I did a body comp challenge to start the year and I figured I’d follow up with the results. Really pleased with them: lost ~17 pounds (from 222 to 205), but also put on ~3 pounds of muscle, so took my body fat from ~22.6% to ~14.4%. I’ve been a little lax with the diet through April (ok, vary lax…. lots of travel plus being a little lax on the heels of a big win), but I’m going to try to get back after it in May and approach my goal of <13% body fat as I round into some fitness challenges in June (Hyrox NYC on June 1, plus another later in the month).

  • My weight loss “trick”? No sugars for 90 days (plus no alcohol, but kind of easy because I don’t drink) was the cornerstone, but lots of other stuff (replacing most meals with salads and grilled chicken breast, cutting out most breads / chips, etc.). Towards the end of the diet, I had a ton of success with having two David bars a day (one in mid-morning; one in mid-afternoon). They’re not cheap, but they’re by far the best bars I’ve found when it comes to pure nutrition (and they don’t taste bad!) and I’m pretty much an evangelist for them now!

State of markets (Monthly recurring piece)

• It’s not a perfect indicator, but I like to use the CNN “Fear & Greed” Index just to quickly quantify where the markets are.

• Last month, things were pretty rough (tipping into extreme fear). Things got even worse to start this month… but we’ve recovered quite a bit from the mid-month absolute “market is terrified¹” post-Liberation day lows. I believe the “extreme fear” gage was tipping to the absolute lows then; we close the month firmly in “fear” territory.

• It remains a really strange market in two ways.

  • The market sells off every few years…. but I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a sell-off cause so single-handidly by an administrations policy, nor be able to be yanked / reimplemented by a fast tweet. I think a lot of people are depressed because the sell-off is such a self own.

  • The dichotomy of stocks is out of this world. “Real world” stocks that have any cyclical exposure are forecasting pretty rocky; just a casual glance at the price of oil or a handful of cyclical stocks (CLF, GM, CAT) would tell you that…. but the bid for the most speculative pieces of the market seems firmly alive. Not only are public company bitcoin shells trading for a huge premium to their bitcoin, but we’re seeing SPACs launch bitcoin shells and instantly double / triple. So you’ve got real world stuff crashing while speculative stuff flies. Strange, strange, strange.

• I will tell you this: perhaps I’m falling victim to the news headlines, but I’m pretty cautious right now. It feels like a lot of business has just been completely frozen for the past month as tariffs get threatened / put on / removed. I’m not sure how that doesn’t do a decent bit of damage to the economy, and the longer this goes on the worse (and more unpredictable) the damage would be. I’m not saying that tariffs are a bad policy (though I personally think they are a poor one); it’s that the constant yo-yo’ing of policy and suddenly putting them on is a disaster. And I’m surprised that the market doesn’t seem to be reflecting much of that damage. Perhaps the market is forecasting a mild recession followed by a boom, but it feels like the tail risks here are high and rising and the market does not have that priced in.

  • For April’s fintwit book club, I read clashing of commerce (it’s the history of American tariffs). It’s wild how many fights in American history have parallels to the fight / talking points around tariffs today…. but one thing that jumped out to me is how far in advance most tariffs are put in place so that people can adjust to them. For example, around p. 75 of the book, America bans exports to Britain…. but they do it a year out (i.e. they pass the ban in 1775 but do it for 1776) so that farmers who have already planted their crop can sell it. That’s obviously an extreme example, but time and again you’ll see tariffs get debated for months and then signed into law with an effective date a month or three out. And that’s in a much less modern economy; given the interconnectedness of our supply chains today, I can’t imagine how crazy the damage is being done by the current state of tariffs.

Nerd Corner (Monthly recurring piece)

• There’s no hiding it; I’m a massive nerd. I read 3-4 fantasy books a month, my favorite pastime is playing board games with my wife and friends, and I was an eager supporter of the Brandon Sanderson (original) Kickstarter (yes, I splurged and went for the hardcover books).

  • I didn’t support Sanderson’s DND-style board game…. but only because my wife would murder me if I bought another board game when I have a whole Dungeon Master kit collecting dust. Still, I wanted to highlight it because between the two Kickstarters Sanderson will have raised >$50m for new projects; if you’re a fan of fantasy and that type of fan enthusiasm doesn’t encourage you to give him a try, I don’t know what will! As I mention below, if you’re trying him out, I’d probably start with Mistborn, though Tess and the Emerald Sea is basically a standalone book and might be my favorite book he’s written

• Anyway, I figured a few of you are nerds like me, so I started this segment to give recs of what I’m nerding out over currently, with the hope that you’ll either try it and enjoy it or recommend me similarly nerdy things that I’ll enjoy. This month’s recs:

  • Big month for reading! Wandering inn book 15 came out, and I read it in maybe 10 days. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s 1200+ pages! Another book in the same world (Grave Song) came out as well; it clocks in at a light ~750 pages, and I’m about halfway through. Pretty good, but tough to get into new characters when I’ve got so much history with the core cast. Outside of that, most of my reading was Clashing Over Commerce for the book club (which clocks in at a light ~1300 pages!).

• PS- outside of my monthly recs, I constantly get asked what my favorite fantasy books are. So I’m just going to throw this list out monthly:

  • Anything Brandon Sanderson writes; he’s by far the best fantasy author out there. I’d probably start with Mistborn, though Tess and the Emerald Sea is basically a standalone book and might be my favorite book he’s written. The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England is also a standalone book and a very fun and fast read. Most of his works are interconnected through something called “the cosmere;” if you’re feeling crazy, here’s how to read the cosmere in order.

  • Kingkiller is probably the best series I’ve ever read; waiting for the third is agony.

  • Gentleman Bastards is right up there with Kingkiller; the mix of fun and world building is outstanding.

  • Red Rising series is more sci-fi, but my god is it good. I would literally stay up all night to read every book the day they came out (note: I’ve only read the first trilogy; I’m going to read the second when the last book comes out later this year).

  • If you’re looking for something a little more under the radar (most of the books above are widely regarded as some of the best fantasy books / series ever), the Licanius Trilogy was fantastic.

  • First Law trilogy is excellent. It can get a little brutal / graphic though; there are a bunch of sequels and spins, but I’ve never been able to finish them because one of them got so brutal I just put the book down and never picked it up again. But the first trilogy is really, really great.

  • The Cradle series probably isn’t as “good” as the books above, but I binged them and every fantasy fan I’ve recommended them to has said something along the line of “I read all ten books in two months after I opened the first one.”

    • I’ve also really enjoyed that author’s newest series, Last Horizon!

  • The Wandering Inn series isn’t for everyone, and the first ~150 pages of the first book need to get powered through…. but, if you can power through them, the world building here is incredible, and I’ve had so many friends get hooked by this series. If you like hard fantasy, I can near guarantee you’ll like it.

  • Similarly, Dungeon Crawler Carl won’t be for everyone, but it’s probably the most fun series of books I’ve ever read, and some of the scenes in the later books carry a surprising amount of emotional weight.

  • The Silvers Epic (Flight of the Silvers, Song of the Orphans, War of the Givens) is more sci-fi than fantasy, but it’s one of my favorite series I’ve ever read and I think is wildly creative in how they use time travel / multiverse as a plot point (the last book was a little slow, but the ending wrapped everything up beautifully / it got a little dusty in the room I was reading).

Other things that caught my eye (monthly recurring piece)

• JPM’s redacted report spells out fear of trump

1. I’ve thought using “market is tariffied” would be a great pun, but I’m not sure if that shows how corny I am.