539: Best of 2025 Holiday Special
Wealth Formula Podcast
It’s been another interesting year in the world of personal finance and macroeconomics. As we look ahead to 2026… well, who really knows what’s coming? I’ll be sharing my own take—and making a few predictions—in an upcoming episode. What’s hard to ignore is just how unusual this moment in history is. We’re coming off COVID. We went through a rapid rise in interest rates, and now a pullback. Tariffs are back in the conversation. There are a lot of moving parts, and as usual, the consensus hasn’t exactly nailed it. Almost every expert was convinced tariffs would push inflation...
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538: Is Gold Still a Buy?
Wealth Formula Podcast
For years, gold was the asset nobody wanted to talk about. It sat there quietly while stocks and real estate continued to rip. Gold was for pessimists. For doomsayers and perma-bears. And then suddenly… gold didn’t just wake up. It launched. As of mid-December 2025, spot gold is trading around $4,300–$4,400 an ounce, depending on the market, marking a gain of roughly 60% over the past year and pushing decisively into record territory. The obvious question is: why now? The short answer is that gold isn’t reacting to one thing. It’s responding to a stacking of pressures that...
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537: Markets Do Not Behave Like Saber-Toothed Tigers
Wealth Formula Podcast
You know, the longer I’ve been an investor, the more I realize this simple truth: the biggest threat to your wealth isn’t the market… it’s your own brain. We’re all wired the same way—with instincts that were fantastic for avoiding saber-toothed tigers but are absolutely terrible for making good financial decisions. Take something simple like a marathon. If I asked you to predict next year’s top finishers, you’d look at last year’s results. That works. Human performance doesn’t flip upside down in twelve months. The best runners tend to stay the best runners. There aren’t...
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536: Should You Own a Home?
Wealth Formula Podcast
Homeownership has been baked into the American Dream for nearly a century. Politicians, parents, and banks all tell you the same thing: “Buy a house as soon as you can. It’s your biggest asset.” But as a real estate guy who actually understands how wealth is created… I’m not convinced it makes sense for everyone—especially early in your career. Let me explain. Say you finally start making some real money—maybe you’re a doctor fresh out of residency. The cultural script kicks in immediately: Buy a house. Build equity. Feel responsible. But here’s the part most people forget:...
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535: Apartment Buildings Are Having a Holiday Type Sale
Wealth Formula Podcast
It’s that time of the year again—Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Everyone loves a deal. If you’ve been investing long enough, you know one important fact: there is always something on sale. The problem is the herd never sees it. They’re too busy chasing whatever feels safe because it’s setting new records. And right now? That’s the stock market. That’s gold. Everyone’s piling into the most expensive things they can find and patting themselves on the back for being “prudent.” But smart investors don’t chase what’s already expensive. They look for the thing sitting quietly on...
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534: The Economics of Professional Sports
Wealth Formula Podcast
This week’s Wealth Formula Podcast is about the economics of sports—if you are a sports fan like me, you will love it. But before we get to that, I want to give you my two cents on one of the most important elements to financial success in anything: conviction. As I write this, Bitcoin sold off from a high of $126K to under $90K. Other cryptos have lost 50-90 percent of their value in the same time. It’s been called a blood bath. Some are even saying it's over for Bitcoin. I might even believe them if I hadn’t seen the same story at least 5 times before over the past decade. True...
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533: What’s Really Going On in Real Estate Right Now with Prof Norm Miller
Wealth Formula Podcast
When you invest in real estate, you’re not buying what it is today—you’re buying what it will become a few years from now. That’s especially true in multifamily, which, despite all the noise, remains one of the most compelling long-term plays out there. Unlike stocks, you don’t get a live ticker reminding you every five seconds what your property is “worth.” And that’s a good thing. Real estate moves slowly, and that patience rewards people who can see the story before it unfolds. The national headlines are confusing right now—depending on who you read,...
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532: Pejman Ghadimi - A New Paradigm for Buying Nice Stuff
Wealth Formula Podcast
A few years back, I bought some very expensive sports coats. I wore them at first and enjoyed them. But over time, they kind of lost their luster. As I have found often to be the case in my life, I don’t tend to care that much about fancy stuff—fancy jackets, fancy shoes. My true self regresses to a fairly simple jeans and flannel circa 1992 style—not expensive. Realizing that these fancy clothes were just rotting in my closet, I recently sold them on a well-known second-hand site with only designer stuff. And I was shocked when I realized I was only getting 10 cents on the...
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531: How to Identify a Good Real Estate Deal
Wealth Formula Podcast
I grew up with a very different perspective on personal finance and investing than most. My parents were immigrants, and when they arrived in this country, they didn’t come with any preconceived notions of conventional financial wisdom. My father grew up dirt poor in India—that’s really poor and he had never even heard of investing as a kid. But he was blessed with a tremendous intellect and used it to rise from nothing to truly live the American dream. He came to the U.S. in the 1960s on an engineering scholarship and started working as a bridge engineer in Minnesota. When he finally...
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530: A Tax Attorney Talks Tax Mitigation with Buck
Wealth Formula Podcast
This week’s Wealth Formula Podcast features an interview with a tax attorney. While I’m not a tax professional myself, I want to drill down on something we touched on briefly that is incredibly relevant to many of you: the so-called short-term rental loophole. If I were a high-earning W-2 wage earner, this would be at the top of my list to implement—and I know many of you are already doing it. The short-term rental loophole is one of those quirks in the tax code that most people don’t even know exists, but once you do, it can be a total game-changer. Here’s why. Normally, when you...
info_outlineMost people picture investing as a game of chess. Everything is visible on the board, the rules are clear, and if you’re sharp enough, you can see ten moves ahead. But markets don’t work like that. They shift in real time—rates change, policies flip, black swan events crash the party. That’s why I think investing looks a lot more like poker.
In poker, you never know all the cards. You play with incomplete information, and even the best players lose hands. What separates them isn’t luck—it’s process. Over time, making slightly better decisions than everyone else compounds into big wins. That’s the same discipline great investors use. They don’t wait for certainty—it never comes. They weigh probabilities, manage risk, and swing hard when the odds line up.
Risk isn’t the enemy. Fold every hand and you’ll bleed out. To win, you’ve got to put chips in the pot—wisely. Wealthy investors do the same. They protect the downside, but when they see an asymmetric bet—small risk, huge upside—they lean in. That’s what early Bitcoin adopters did. That’s what smart money did in real estate after 2008.
And just like poker, investing is about knowing when to quit. Ego and sunk costs can trap you in bad hands, but the pros know when to fold and move their chips to a better table.
In the end, both games reward patience, discipline, and emotional control. You don’t need to win every hand. You just need to stay in the game long enough for compounding to do its work. The amateurs play for excitement. The pros play for longevity.
That’s the mindset you need as an investor and the reason I interviewed a former professional poker player on this week's Wealth Formula Podcast!
Learn more about Annie Duke: https://linktr.ee/annieduke