A reminder to focus on the long-term; a look at growing corporate debt levels; a helpful explanation of stock buy backs, and a tip to improve the workplace. It’s been an illuminating week.

Canadian insurance companies are no longer just in the business of selling insurance to Canadians. They function more like financial conglomerates, and that, for investors, is potentially a good thing.

This week we admired some exemplary examples of CEO annual letters; raised our eyebrows at the remarkable effects of trade wars; reaffirmed our belief that language matters; and despaired at nefarious online trading platforms.

Given how often “defensive” enters into the investing lexicon and that it can mean different things to different people, aiming for a greater degree of precision in its definition may help to reduce misunderstanding or generalized historical bias.

Twenty ways to make mistakes with money, the history of monetary innovation, untangling misconceptions around interest rates, and the truth (data) about the creativity of pop songs. It was (not) a boring week!

In theory, investors should improve at least linearly over time as they make and learn from errors. But in practice, there seems to be little evidence of this (only few active managers beat the market over longer time periods).