Great Michael Lewis piece in Portfolio on fellow south Louisianian Blaine Lourd — although, actually, it’s about index funds and the efficient market hypothesis. But not many people would want to read a piece on index funds and the EMT, so there’s lots of other fun stuff mixed in.

(For what it’s worth, the official position of crabwalk.com is pro-EMT, pro-indexing, anti-active management, and pro-DFA, the financial advising firm that gets mentioned prominently in the piece. I’m pro-DFA (a) because I think the Fama-French model is correct and (b) I like to imagine it’s actually the NYC dance-punk label DFA that’s doing the investing.)

I did my once-a-year check on my stocks last night and, if anyone’s interested in the crabwalk.com Way of Investing, I’ll be heading into 2008 with FUSEX, VEMSX, FSIIX, VWO, IFSM, VBR, and EFV. All are the sort of low-cost, broad-asset-class index funds Lourd would approve of. (The first three of those aren’t my ideal choices, but they’re the best indexing instruments available in my 401(k), which is where most of my savings rest. They end up skewing my portfolio a bit more large-cap and a bit more growth-over-value than I’d like, but not by too much.)

By the way, this Michael Lewis interview is one of the best in the @Google series — he’s much more open and engaging than most. Also useful if you want to hear what an unreconstructed New Orleans accent sounds like. (UPDATE: It appears that Lewis gave two different lectures at Google and I linked to the wrong one; I meant this one. I don’t mean to say the other one is a bad talk, just that I haven’t watched it.)

10 December 2007

Comments

11 December | 12:52 | Andrew Smith

I'm surprised the accent isn't more pronounced. He lingers a bit over long "i"s but I'd have thought unreconstructed New Orleans upper class would sound like a southernized FDR, the last famous person to speak with the unreconstructed upper class Northeastern accent that was forever killed by WW2 and TV.

11 December | 13:17 | Josh

I don't know nearly enough about accents to say for sure, but the classic NOLA working-class-white accent is supposed to evoke mid-century Brooklyn (being connected by their port-city mix of Italians, Greeks, etc.). Upper-class NOLA shares a bit of the French lilt with Cajuns, but has an extra hint of what to me sounds almost a little South African in the vowels.

Try: http://www.slate.com/id/2125901/

11 December | 20:17 | kitty

I am no expert on accents, either, but he sounds much like most other upper class New Orleanians I know. Some local friends of mine and I have all observed that the only way for us to automatically tell that a New Orleanian is upper class is the way they pronounce "New Orleans." I can't even begin to type it the way they pronounce it, but they all pronounce it the same way. I'm convinced they must teach people the proper accent during the Rex or Comus balls.

I love Michael Lewis -- Liar's Poker is one of my favorite books. He's so smart and down to earth. His post-Katrina piece was also dead-on, in my opinion.

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Joshua Benton

Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)