May 8, 2026

If you’ve hung around personal-finance forums for any length of time (and god help me I have), you’ve run across the “4% rule”: when you’re figuring out how much you can spend in retirement, the rule of thumb is that you can withdraw 4% of that initial lump, per year, inflation-adjusted, with a very low risk of running out of money at any time in the ensuing thirty years. (You might also have seen this stated as the “rule of 25”: if you have a retirement lump of cash equal to 25x your annual spending, you’re good to retire.

Sep 13, 2025

TL;DR Ripple has announced an unexpected tender offer, for a further 2.5% of the company at $250/share; It looks like they’re increasing the frequency of buybacks from 2x/year to 4x/year, as well as increasing the price; This lifts the buyback-DCF valuation of Ripple’s common stock significantly, from $79 to $160/share. Cash on the barrelhead A few weeks ago, I took a stab at valuing Ripple’s stock after the resolution of the SEC v Ripple suit, and I argued that Ripple’s twice-yearly buybacks implied a ~$79 valuation floor for the stock, compared to $120 where it was trading at the time.

Aug 13, 2025

Back in 2014, clients and banks in Hong Kong got carried out backward when a sharp move in USDCNH blew up clients who’d unwisely bought Target Redemption Forwards (henceforth TARFs). I wrote about it at the time, and republished the piece here a year later. The conclusion was that TARFs are a terrible trade for everyone involved: clients will inevitably blow up because they’re leveraged short low-delta wings, and bank exotics desks will blow up because these things are a cast-iron bastard to properly hedge1.

Aug 8, 2025

TL;DR SEC v Ripple has come to an end, with Ripple agreeing to pay a $125mio fine; XRP is officially not a security, and Ripple is not barred from selling XRP except through certain channels; Re-running my analyses from 2022 gives a valuation for Ripple common stock in the mid-500s per share, based on a $3.30 XRP price—compared to a $120 price in secondary markets1, and a recent tender at $175; Ripple is also aggressively buying back stock, which is compressing the discount, but the company needs to accelerate the buybacks or go public—preferably the latter—to justify the current price and compress the discount.

Apr 21, 2022

Disclaimer: I own a bunch of Ripple common stock thanks to being an employee there for nearly five years, so I’m absolutely talking my book with this article. Ripple’s common stock has always traded at a significant discount to the value of the company’s assets. In this article, I’m gonna break down how to value Ripple’s stock; what it might be worth on a sum-of-parts basis; and what it might be worth in various scenarios once the SEC lawsuit is resolved.