Categories
Politics Saint Louis

华人亚裔们如何在生活工作中避免川普2.0带来的一些弊端

Reading Time: < 1 minute

美国最近一个月，川普他胡汉山又回来了。他这一卷土重来，可谓是来者不善善者不来。基本上把联邦政府翻了底朝天。他最近半年来宠幸的世界首富马斯克，带着一帮美国红卫兵，直接关了两个机构（USAID和CFPB），裁了所有的试用期的联邦政府员工。同时所有的机构包括国防部都要裁员。对华人来说，在高校研究机构工作的人，有不少是拿联邦政府的grant, 一般是通过NIH（卫生部）和NSF（国家科学基金会）。她们中应该也/已有一些收到直接间接的影响。有点搞笑的是，其实华人中有不少是川粉，或者是投票给川普的选民。这下好，搬起石头，直接砸自己的脚。这个让我想到前两天看到一个博文下的两个有点意思的评论：

如果川普发动战争，让你儿子死在战场，川粉会说，如果没有川王保护，我们会全家覆灭。奴才永远没有清醒的能力；


川粉但凡有点思考能力就不会是川粉了。川粉醒悟不了，有个关于美国农民的新闻里说得挺好，被川虐待千百遍，仍待川普如初恋。

安全

我97年夏天来美国，经历过克林顿（三年多，小克第二任任期是从97年1月20日开始），小布什（8年），奥巴马（8年），川普 1.0（4年）， 拜登（4年），接下来不出意外川普2.0还有3年11个月。

其实我刚来美国的时候，我在罗拉 University of Missouri at Rolla (后来改名为 Missouri University of Science and Technology: 一般现在简称是 Missouri S&T). 罗拉是一个小镇，97年是美国发生9-11（2001年）之前，所以在那里当时总的来说我感觉并没有什么歧视。我现在想想，那时候没有感觉受到各种歧视，尤其是种族歧视。我猜主要还是因为我们那时就是穷学生，尤其从经济上来说，当地美国人心理上对我们其实是有优越感的。

Covid

I recall lots of unprovoked violence towards Asian and Chinese during pandemic, especially the early days (the shutdown phase). Note for many Americans (white, black and latinos), they cannot tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.

这不，醉心村(Creve Coeur) 的高档超市 Dierbergs 上礼拜五就有人在打移民，嫌犯被警察给抓了 – Man arrested for ‘discriminatory’ grocery store attack in Creve Coeur。引用一下KSDK：

“I’m tired of foreigners, man. Walking all over the place, making our money cost so much more than it should. F—ing people trampling over us.”

这个应该就是在 Marshall’s, TJ Maxx 所在的购物广场，BJC West，醉心村 Millennium Park 的对面。我以前就住醉心村：醉心村是圣村/圣路易斯郡当中不错的居民区，也有不少移民，包括华人，印度人，其它亚裔等；犹太人也不少。

我也没啥好的建议：我想大家能低调还是低调吧。还有可以考虑练一下防卫术，美国尤其是密苏里不禁枪，所以。。。大家心里有数。实在忍无可忍的时候是要自卫的。

PS: actually, now I have read the KSDK article, and I recall I had a similar incident at the Busch stadium probably in year 2008. A white man said something racist to me, and I talked back. At that time, we didn’t have kids: just me and my wife. So, something to keep in mind, if you have small kids (hint: the safety of your kids is probably the most important).

Reference

Federal Shifts in Higher Ed: A Survival Guide for Academia Kindle Edition by Ruopeng An

西裔女童遭同学威胁向ICE检举“抓你全家” 轻生身亡 || School district confirms bullying occurred after investigation following Texas girl’s death by suicide (CNN) || After 11-Year-Old’s Suicide, School Confirms She Was Bullied — but Claims There’s More to the Story. Her Mom Denies It (People)

My point here is always pay attention to your kids’ mental health.

Categories
Software development

Two observations on software engineering

Reading Time: 3 minutes

For a guy with a hammer, everything is a nail

Use SQL for everything

At Mastercard, I used to have a colleague who is great at SQL. And once I realized he used PL/SQL for quite complex business logic for a “promotion build” and it backfired. The customer noticed there were some inconsistencies and notified us. Upon further examination from yours truly, it appears the code has some logic flaw. Note the flaws in the PL/SQL is hard to detect, compared to code/app written in a more general purpose programming language such as Java and following proper testing procedure. The cost of that mistake is we end up sent about $40 k to the business customer (a bank). I can understand why PL/SQL is being used there, because that’s the main skill my former colleague had, and in other words, he has this hammer (SQL), and he was using it at every place possible. A second reason is my manager was probably under pressure to deliver that functionality, and he probably was not willing to or getting help from the dev team: and I knew we have quite a few Java developers there, and some of them are pretty good.

Performance Testing went too far

This applies to performance testing (JMeter is a popular tool). When I worked at Ascension, my boss likes running performance testing via JMeter. Also at the time, we have an engineer who knows the tool. And once we ran performance testing without realizing that we sent emails in our testing, and our testing brought the company outlook server down to its knees 🙁 In hindsight, I felt this kind of testing is not really necessary. You can read some of the examples I listed in my blog post too. The lesson here again is: someone fell in love with the performance testing, or performance of the system. I am not saying it’s a bad thing, but the approach they were taking to me is very amateurish. And as you can read from my blog post, that’s one main factor a multi millions dollars project failed. Somehow the recent DOGE efforts in finding fraud and waste in the US government reminded me of that failed project.

Layoff to cut cost

Now Elon’s DOGE team seems got obsessed with cutting staff (hammer) in the federal government: which was first used during the Elon’s Twitter takeover. He is using that hammer again from his previous experience. In short term, if you cut staff, you may get some more productivity from the remaining staff, because the remaining people will be scared and have to work harder to make up the slack etc. But there will be longer term consequence. I don’t think it’s as straightforward as cutting staff at Twitter (X). But again Elon only knows hammer. He really doesn’t have other tools in his toolbox.

I am pretty sure this “hammer/nail” mentality applies to other fields as well. For example I saw quite a few Asian parents pushing kids to work harder (the main reason is those Asian parents mostly worked hard to get here), without realizing “work smarter” is actually way more important.

How to measure the productivity of software engineers

My short answer is you cannot. But for managers they cannot take this answer, especially at the places they have mandatory quota based layoffs, in America I recall Jack Welch is the one who started it: refer to Jack Welch: how he justified his famous ‘fire the bottom 10%” and Short-term profits and long-term consequences — did Jack Welch break capitalism?

And at Mastercard, in early 2019, yours truly was hit by that too. I was Lead Software Engineer at the team, but unfortunately I got into some “grunt” work, not necessarily code related, thus my GitHub stats was not great.

What are the grunt work? You may ask. And since you ask me: I would ask google. Here are the answers from Google’s Search Labs | AI Overview

======

“Grunt work” in software development refers to the repetitive, often tedious, and basic tasks that are necessary to complete a project, like data entry, basic code cleaning, configuration management, or setting up initial infrastructure, essentially the foundational work that needs to be done before moving on to more complex features or design elements. Key points about “grunt work”:

Example of grunt work in software development:

======

So my lesson learned from there, along with a similar lesson I learned from Ascension Health, is: coding more, and do less of the grunt work.

At least, when a manager who only cares about those stats come by (aka, someone like Elon Musk), I can point to the source code repository, and show her/him the stats.

In reality though, layoff is more than just the stats.

PS: came across this YT video – Aging Software Dev – Can You Still Compete After 40?

Categories
advice and tips Life Tips

Kids or younger folks used apparel shoes resell stores

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Not a complete list

Online

I am aware of eBay, Etsy, PoshMark. But I learned couple new ones.

Curtsy : our 14 year old (when she was still 13, but almost 14), bought a nike puffer jacket

Depop (wikipedia, just realized it’s a subsidiary under Etsy) – our 14 year old tries to sell her Lululemon shorts from Plato’s closet (too big)

Offline, brick-mortar

Plato’s Closet: seems heavily gear toward teen and 20 to 30 years old younger adults

Categories
Life Politics

Muskrat, the higher ups’ kids are more precious

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Tom Krause – CEO, Cloud Software Group – finance guy – Princeton U alumni – Now you know not all ivies have high moral standards, because Tom is obviously a #muskrat or a fat cat in the corporate world (ABS News). Quote the ABC news article a bit:

One former Cloud Software Group employee said she hid her pregnancy for fear it could make her a target of layoffs. An ex-manager said they dreaded filing performance reviews of subordinates, knowing some workers may fall victim to the next cycle of cuts. Another former employee said they avoided expressing unease in company emails or in the messaging app Slack out of concern that it could jeopardize their job.

Oligarchs and ordinary people

When I was watching the “Surviving Black Hawk Down” on Netflix last night, I just realized all the US presidents (since I came to the USA) and all the billionaires in America never sent their own kids to the war zone. John McCain is an exception, but he was a multimillionaire.

Meanwhile, how many regular folks’ husband, wife, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters etc. died in Afghanistan and Iraq (thousands, refer to US casualty in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War). As I say this from time to time, the loss of one soldier usually impacts more than one person: because the fallen solider could have parents, wife, kids, siblings, and so on.

This sounds like today’s Russia: obviously they have even higher casualty in the Russia Ukraine war. In the case of Russia, they are so short of soldiers in the now: because they cannot incentive people in the Moscow and St. Peterburg area to fight, so they are getting all the young folks from less developed areas, such as Chechen and Syberia, plus North Korea. Just like the US sent soldiers from Missouri to Afghanistan. I recall in year 2021 a young marine from St. Charles County died during the fanatic Kabul Airport withdrawal. In total 13 marines died in that suicide attack: there are very little mentioning in the US news media 2021 Kabul airport attack – Wikipedia.

PS: I wrote a bluesky thread on the topic above too.

Categories
Stocks

WeChat stock group chat 橄榄村美股群

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Not financial advice. This is the most important thing you need to know.

Your money your decision. Try not to be forever diver 不要做永远♾️的潜水员. 

11-15-2025

I maintained a page for Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. I understand I need to clean up the page a bit. But the two thanksgiving letters from Warren Buffett are worth to read.

10-31-2025

My personal portfolio allocation: S&P 500 index fund or similar stock funds about 80%, Berkshire Hathaway B share, about 10%, the rest about 10% are other stocks for fun (bigger players include $KO and $OXY).

Also, please note your peace of mind is the most important thing, and it will impact your portfolio performance too.

09-17-2025

一般情况下不要去short 股票，比如S&P 500 index fund, 或者MAG 7的股票。原因主要是the upper side of shorting stocks is limited (100%), while the downside could be unlimited. 打个比方说，最近热炒的 $OPEN (Opendoor Technologies), 如果你在五块钱的时候 （8/22）去short 它，今天 9/17 收盘价 $10.21, 不到一个月就已经亏了100%了（total loss）。如果你不想认输，等它到$15, 就会亏200%。以此类推。反过来说公司股票要清零（公司破产）一般来说没这么快：我看到我家门口的骗子公司Benson Hill 大概最后也花了一年时间破产。

02-21-2025

每个人都可以自己的炒股风格：但是归根结底，不管黑猫白猫，会抓老鼠🐭的猫才是好猫。

要做好风险控制：拿每个人可以接受的钱去炒股票，一般不能all in. 尽量留一部份现金等等。

02-15-2025

1. Be happy; 2. 赚钱是王道：don’t lose money; 3. Refer to rule 1 and 2. 

01-16-2025

My top 3 stock positions (excluding the stocks indirectly hold in various S&P 500 index funds): brk/b, KO and OX. 

Some learning resource: 活到老学到老：这一点也很重要，沃伦巴菲特和查理芒格都是学习机器。

他俩主要的学习手段是读书，读年报，再加上自己独立思考。

Warren Buffett reads a lot of company’s annual reports: mostly to learn. 

I found listening to companies’ Earning call to be educational sometimes – 

EARNMOAR – YouTube 

Fyfull – YouTube  

奶头乐级别: “NaNa 说美股” 每天市场评述，mainly entertainment value –  ; 

“小lin说” various topics, mainly entertainment and education value –  个人感觉小林讲的一般不深奥，主要是入门知识，但是她讲的还是有干货的；

美国年轻人Joseph Carlson Show and Joseph Carlson After Hours 他好像有两个频道 – stocks, food for thought – 比如这个油管视频： 

 Please note one goal for many content creators including YouTubers is getting eyeballs 👀 👁️ and making💰. So keep this in my mind when you consume the online content. 

我又想了一下。我觉得网上多数视频包括CNBC Jim Cramer 的mad money，包括Nana 的油管每天更新，还有其它很多，教育或有启发的东西不是很多。娱乐的成分倒是不少。可能有点这个短视频的”奶头乐”的味道吧。或者相当于麦当劳🍔的快餐。光吃那个或天天吃那个可能不是最健康：因为营养成分不够丰富。还是要自己做饭，或吃一些更健康的食品（少吃垃圾食品，少喝可乐等等）[捂脸][呲牙] 

Together let’s share some 💡 and make some 💰. 

We try to keep the America (US) politics at a minimum here. 

I believe everyone is entitled to her or his opinion including political views and affiliation. 

But those are best kept to yourself. Probably religion too. 

I recall 20+ years ago one golden rule is not to talk politics and religion at work. 

Also, we will try to keep out many fake stuffs on Internet or from social medias.

PS:

Hard core MAGAs may find it hard to stay there sometimes because I am “woke”, or Hua Zuo if you will (I may 🙂

Not directly related to this: but I managed to clean up WeChat contacts today (from 321 to 250). I recall research saying that a person can have meaningful relationship with 150 people – so probably I need to further cut down that number, because this is just my Chinse friends. Most people on WeChat are Chinese, which is not a secret.

Previously like I said on the top, if I join a group, my intension is to learn by joining the discussion. If I feel I cannot contribute or if the vibe in a group is totally out of my comfort zone, I leave 🙂

Categories
advice and tips Career Life Tips Software development

Layoff and other forms of rejections in life are not the end of the world

Reading Time: < 1 minute

What doesn’t kill us can only made us stronger — German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche — his original words are: “Out of life’s school of war—what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.”

Five years ago today, 01-23-2019, Wednesday, I was laid off from the company I worked for about 3 and half years. I saved the below email in my Gmail account.

Hi Minjie,

You mentioned to me this morning that you had a work computer at your home. I wanted to let you know we’ll be sending you a pre-paid box for you to send it back in.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks!

…………

That being said, if you were working for the federal government and recently got laid off because of Elon Musk’s DOGE’s purge, and if you like to talk to someone – I am available.

Potentially I can provide some advice re: how to get back to your feet quick. I can buy you coffee, do mock interview during lunch (I will pay), and pay your Uber ride fee, if you have an onsite interview and need Uber/Lyft.

In my career, I navigated layoff situations a few times, and I was able to find something relatively quick mainly in the area of software development. I understand right now it’s a very tough job market in the USA. But it’s still possible to find something. I am a strong believer of 树挪死人挪活。I believe layoffs are usually blessings disguised in curses. Somewhat like divorce during a truly horrendous marriage.

Reference: I talked about more about layoffs here in my 2023 blog post.

Categories
401k and Personal Finance uber-and-side-hustle

Turbo Tax Desktop and doing tax for eBay and Uber

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Chinese version (translated by Google) is here: 谷歌翻译的中文版在这里。

Turbo Tax web vs Desktop

I switched from Turbo Tax Web version to Desktop version in last 4 years. The main reason is the latter is cheaper (if we consider both the state and tax). It’s probably $40 to $50 cheaper. Before the switch I used the web version for 20 years. I was happy with the web version for the most part: had one or two minor glitches during 20 years journey. One glitch was on me: it was quite a few years ago, 15 to 20 years ago, when I was working for my 1st employer then. That year I purchased the Turbo Tax state (online version) too, and I also purchased the audit defense. But the stupid program allowed me to put in a negative number for the income in the state tax form, and state rejected the tax filing out of box. It was not too difficult to fix that – zero out the number did the trick if my memory is correct. But after that I decided for the state filing I would just use the online PDF form (with calculation capability), and mail in the tax form to the Jeff City instead.

Also, once I made a bad mistake. I installed the desktop version on my personal laptop MacBook Pro 16 inch Intel. And it crashed on me, and I didn’t have backup copy for the Turbo Tax filing file after filing. I recall from my past experience, Turbo Tax usually started from last year’s return, and at one time I was quite worried. Later luckily I was able to find out the actual e-filing from Uncle Sam’s website. Nowadays I store the Turbo Tax filing file on the cloud – feel a bit safer than my local desktop or laptop 🙂

Last tip for Turbo Tax Web: one can always use it for free (without filing), so for example, if you do it manually (say on paper, or via Excel), you can still use Turbo Tax Web, solely for calculation, comparison or verification purpose.

Retailer (where I buy the Turbo Tax software)

I think I paid about $82 for premier at Amazon.com this year. Today (02-02-2025) I saw Costco U city has $15 instant rebate on the top of that ($82). So next year I may buy from Costco instead of Amazon. For Amazon I download the software from their website: used to be Amazon, this year it’s Intuit the company behind Turbo Tax. I expect buying from Costco will be similar.

Do we want Audit Defense?

I got it last year – and I plan to continue to get it this year.

Some notes for me this year

eBay sent me a 1099-K. New for me this year. I am in the process of itemize the cost. This is more tedious than I thought initially. Here is some guidelines from Turbo Tax, btw. I may end up doing it as business too (see Uber below).

(Update 02-24-2025) I did more reading, mainly from

A Tax Filing Factsheet for eBay Sellers (Turbo Tax) and What to do with Form 1099-K (IRS). I decided to go with the Schedule C route (Below Uber is similar).

In my personal opinion, this approach is better than the other Form 8949 approach as implicitly suggested by the Turbo Tax.

Uber driving is also new to me. didn’t send me 1099-K as I didn’t meet their income threshold of $5,000. I mainly followed this Turbo Tax knowledge article as well the Turbo Tax Desktop Premier for this. I took the mileage standard deduction: used the online miles. And I used the tax summary from Uber (available in the Uber Driver App go to Account => Tax Doc) for the online mileages. Overall I am quite happy with the milage deduction (business expense, schedule C).

Summary for reporting taxes for eBay and Uber: again this is new to me. I learned two things: 1) Schedule C for business expense, reporting etc; 2) Refer to IRS website and their document as needed. In the past I mostly rely on Turbo Tax, or google. This time around I still use google, but Google pointed me to the IRS website. It’s good.

Keep things in perspective on Uber driving: the number one priority is always your (driver) safety, passenger safety and overall happiness. Money or tax saving for that matter, should not be a priority compared to the things I just mentioned. It’s more like icing on the cake. The cake itself better to be good – otherwise say if there are too many lemons among passengers, I will quit. This should be applicable to many things in life too, your day job, your other side gigs, and so on. I know I probably say it from somewhat privileged view point – as I do have some savings that allow to me “don’t have to work” for a while, if needed. Again keep things in perspective, I have worked in the USA for almost 25 years. I am at a stage of winding down my day job (career for some more career minded people, no judgement from yours truly here). At the same time, I am thinking about what I want to do after my retirement from my day job. Hint: I posted some plan here. But again, this is subject to change without any notice – the main stakeholders I need to notify is my wife and kids. I want to make sure they are comfortable, and can still splurge as they choose so.

Stocks: one of my favorite topics :-). For my 2 small regular brokerage accounts anyway: one again I traded too much and don’t have much gain to show for. So that’s my main lesson – I need to stick to the winners and hopefully stay away from the losers all together 🙂 Majority of my money (401k, HSA and 529 plans) are in S&P 500 index funds or equivalent. I do have two IRA accounts too: and I trade stocks there, and I am very pleased to announce that my luck there is better than the “2 small regular brokerage accounts” 🙂

State filing is included in the Turbo Tax desktop. One thing I noticed is 529 plan can save some state income taxes. (02-25-2025) Just realized the e-filing for the state is $25 or $40 extra. I decided to file via paper to save that money. (Update 03-04-2025) I sent the state filing tax via USPS mail. The postage is about $3.43 + printing cost which is about 8 cents x 42 pages = $3.36. Total is about $6.79 which is a bit cheaper than about $20 e-filing via Turbo Tax ($25 plus $5 off offer from couple of my Chase CC).

Some Odds and Ends

Probably more than 20 years ago, I recall my big boss has an Excel spreadsheet for tax filing, and he offered to co-workers. I didn’t take the offer. I think it may be a cheaper and better option, but I already fell into the Turbo Tax rabbit hole.

There is a common American saying: only death and taxes are certain 🙂

Other Choices

FreeTaxUSA.com

HR Block

TaxSlayer

Full Disclosure:

Not tax advice. Please consult a professorial tax advisor (an accountant, or a CPA) as needed.

I don’t receive any compensation from Turbo Tax. And I don’t have Inuit $INTU individual stock right now (02-26-2025). The reason I say individual stock is I do have S&P 500 index fund, and I assume $INTU is in the S&P 500.

(Update 03-04-2025) YT: Mass IRS Layoffs — How It Affects Your Tax Refund & Audits! by ClearValue Tax

(Update 03-05-2025) The Tennessean: 2025 tax season off to slow start amid federal layoffs, hiring freeze. Will refunds be affected? What to know

(Update 03-11-2025) Filed and accepted on Tue, Feb 25 – I just saw refund money hit the bank via DD 🙂 Total is about 2 weeks.

Categories
advice and tips

Online privacy: some minor struggle I had today

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I was fairly active online, including on LinkedIn. I started on LinkedIn on fall 2008, about 16 or 17 years ago: mainly for job and networking purpose. But recently I noticed a minor problem I had after I posted my Calendly link. And I liked to get back to the LinkedIn post and edit it: unfortunatley there is no good UI to get to my post. As you can see, the google caches the wrong linkedIn post (probably same month).

Mar 6, 2024 — How to create an #appointment #button in #LinkedIn without #premium sub. I put my #calendly link – https://lnkd.in/gAWsYrPM (this is the link goes to my Calendly link) as a link in my …

I also thought about maybe I posted the link at another person’s post as comment. I looked manually and didn’t see my name there.

After some struggle, I finally found the place in Calendly that I can turn off the meeting invitation.

My lesson here IS: post or comment on LinkedIn less. One reason is it’s impossible to go back and edit (endless scrolling) to get the old post. Another reason is because LinkedIn is usually for work or look for work. Saying too much there may not be a good thing for work or when I need to look for work 🙂

PS: this reminds me of a similar thing. Once, to be precise twice, I posted my children’s piano teacher contact information in a FB group, as I was under the “wrong” assumption that he was interested to have more students. And he found out it’s me and told me to delete the post (comment to be precise). I did. But at first it seems I only deleted one post. Later he told me he still got calls, and I searched the FB, and deleted the other post (or comment). Comparatively speaking, FB is better than LinkedIn in terms of search capability.

Categories
401k and Personal Finance Edu-and-Ladue-School

College financial aid seminar

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Learned Net Price Calculator (DoE, bigFuture.collegeBoard; local fav wustl is on the 2nd list).

Learned FAFSA (always try to fill it out), and CSS Profile.

Learned Student Aid Index (SAI).

Learned Missouri A+ Scholarship program.

Btw, I wrote about 529 plan (college savings account) here.

Steve Jobs on education (shorter version, longer version). Enlightening 🙂

PS: learned Horatio Alger Association National & State Scholarship by chance, via Paul Anthony Novelly obituary.

(Update 03-29-2025) Noticed wustl released a new Instant Net Price Estimator.

(Update 05-01-2025, Pay Walled, NY Times)

Colleges Know How Much You’re Willing to Pay. Here’s How.

Categories
advice and tips Life Life Tips

Don’t always dwelling on the past 不要总是留恋过去

Reading Time: < 1 minute

对过去的留恋可能是人之常情，尤其是对上了年纪的人（大概过了50岁的人可以说是上了年纪？），还有一些曾经辉煌，现在落魄的人。

有一个例子是鲁迅笔下的祥林嫂。实际生活中其实这种情况不少。我感觉我自己有时候也会说/想：想当年，我年轻的时候，blah blah blah.

最近 formerly executive assistant at square, sorry I could not find her profile on LinkedIn now, as I unfollowed her recently. Due to LinkedIn’s algorithm (or AI), it seems quite hard for me to find her again (refer to my recent blog post re: LinkedIn’s search-ability).

PS (02-09-2025) I gave it more thought: I think self pity (e.g., 祥林嫂) and similarly self victimization are probably traits or characteristics of narcism. I didn’t read the psychology behind it. Pure guess on my part.

(Update 10-28-2025) Self pity is the trait Charlie Munger talked about quite a bit, and he thinks that’s one of the most destructive traits.

Value Trap

This just reminded me of one thing or one phenomenon in the stock market or stock trading: value trap. Sometimes I got into it. The past price of stock just reflects the past. Nothing more. But sometimes, people think it a stock drops suddenly and drops a lot, they will think it’s a deal, and rush to buy it. And I have done that many times too, like today I bought some PayPal stocks. And I quickly realized it could be value trap, just like the Polaris Inc stock that I traded a while ago.