Money Lessons with Andrew Temte, PhD, CFA

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy reads a pay stub for the lines most people skip past. 

He sorts every deduction into two types — the ones the law requires and the ones you elected, usually in the paperwork on your first day — and explains why a health premium, an HSA, and a retirement contribution come out of your pay before your taxes are figured, and why the federal taxes don't all treat those deductions t...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy supplies the vocabulary behind three weeks of teaching on habits, defaults, and friction. 

Herbert Simon — who was never an economist — challenged his era's assumption that buyers decide with complete information, and won a Nobel Prize for finding those limits inside companies before anyone thought to look for them in customers. 

Richard Thaler named the arrangement of op...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from the money machinery listeners build themselves to the machinery that gets installed before they arrive. 

He starts with the default — what happens if you do nothing — and shows how much of a household's money moves according to settings that somebody at a company chose in advance. 

The workplace retirement plan serves as the rare example of a default that works...

In this special edition of Money Lessons, Andy takes on a question that sits underneath most of personal finance: why change is so hard. 

A complaint about his band's setlist leads to the research on why musical taste is set around age fourteen — and to the study showing that appetite for financial risk locks in the same way, set by whatever the markets were doing when a person first had money in play. 

Neither one ...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy opens up the machinery that moves money out of a household without ever passing through a decision. 

He starts with the narrow definition psychologists use for the word "habit" — a behavior repeated in the same surroundings until conscious decision-making drops out — and walks through the 2002 wristwatch studies that measured how often people's minds were somewhere else while ...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy turns from the map of your personal economy to the thing that moves money across it — decisions. 

He explains why good and bad decisions never arrive in the same size, and why one large mistake can undo a decade of quiet good ones. 

The centerpiece is present bias, the mental shortcut that treats anything happening right now as far more important than the same thing months from...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy launches a brand-new series on personal financial management by drawing the map: the six jobs your money has — earn, spend, borrow, protect, grow, and give. 

He explains why spending feels so effortless in a consumer-driven economy where household spending makes up about 68 percent of everything the U.S. produces in a year. Along the way, he introduces the idea that will guide the e...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy closes the series on equity by turning to the hardest part of owning stocks: holding on. 

He explains why volatility is the price investors pay for the equity risk premium, and why the market's steepest falls and sharpest recoveries tend to arrive back to back — which is what makes market timing a losing game. 

He looks at the evidence that the more investors trade, the less th...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy makes the long-run case for owning stocks — why, over a lifetime, equities have rewarded the patient owner. 

He unpacks the equity risk premium, the extra return stocks have paid over bonds and cash since 1928, and shows how compounding turns that yearly edge into life-changing wealth. 

Andy closes with direct advice for young investors — start early, invest steadily, and...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy widens the map beyond American markets to make the case for owning international stocks. 

He explains home-country bias — the natural pull to invest only in the companies of your own country — and points out that more than a third of the world's stock market value sits outside the United States. 

Andy walks through the two practical ways an ordinary investor can own forei...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy answers a question he has been holding since last year: if your stock trades are free, how does a broker make its money? 

He explains payment for order flow — the arrangement where your broker sells your order to a wholesale market maker that fills it and pays for the privilege. Andy walks through why your everyday orders are so valuable, where the real conflict of interest hides, a...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explains the exchange-traded fund — the ETF — the vehicle most people now use to own a whole index in a single trade. 

He traces it back to the first one, State Street's SPDR, launched in 1993 to track the S&P 500, and shows how an ETF differs from the index mutual fund Jack Bogle created in 1976: one trades all day on an exchange like a stock, the other prices just once, ...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy tackles a phrase we lean on without ever defining it: "the market." He explains what a stock market index is, where the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq-100 come from, and how each one measures the market differently — the Dow by share price, the others by company size. He unpacks the Dow's hidden divisor and the outsized power of a denominator, shows how a handful of giant compa...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy uses the 2021 GameStop saga to reveal the hidden machinery that runs underneath every stock trade. 

He explains how a struggling video-game retailer became the most heavily bet-against stock on Wall Street, why ordinary investors banded together to buy it, and how its price rocketed from about $17 to around $483 in a matter of weeks. 

Then he answers the question that left millions o...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explores information asymmetry—the gap between what some market participants know and what others know—and the rules that try to keep that gap from getting too wide. 

He walks through the structural advantages built into the architecture of the market itself, the meaningful distinction between buy-side and sell-side analysts that financial pundits throw around without explanat...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explores one of the most misunderstood practices in financial markets — short selling. He traces the origins of the practice to Isaac Le Maire and the Dutch East India Company in 1609, walks through the mechanics of borrowing shares to sell them, and explains the asymmetric risk that makes short positions fundamentally different from owning a stock. 

He brings the lesson to life wit...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy picks up where last week's IPO episode left off and walks through what changes once a company is publicly traded. 

He explains the lockup period that follows every IPO — using Airbnb's May 17, 2021 lockup expiration and six-percent drop as the concrete example — then breaks down the SEC's three core disclosure filings (10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K) that drive the rhythm of public-compa...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy walks through what happens when a company goes public — how a private business with a small group of owners becomes a publicly traded stock that anyone with a brokerage account can buy. 

The episode covers the five reasons companies decide to go public, the underwriting process and the role of investment banks, the road show and how the offering price gets set, and what happens on t...

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy tackles one of the most foundational questions in investing: what is a stock actually worth? Returning to value-investing pioneer Benjamin Graham, Andy walks through the three primary lenses professional analysts use to estimate stock value—relative valuation, asset-based valuation, and cash-flow-based valuation—and shows how each one offers a different angle on the same question.&...