You recently completed a very verbose series here at DQYDJ on investor psychology, the failure of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, and how to improve on buy and hold. If you survived all of that, you're probably wondering: "hey PK! You mentioned in the EMH article that you trade stocks on valuation. How do you know that you're doing the right thing?"

Good point dear reader, and to tell you the truth, until I ran the numbers this weekend I wasn't quite sure. However, lucky for you and my ego I have now run the numbers and am ready to share my investing history.

Since you've now read my treatises on Investor Psychology and the Flaws of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, we're finally ready to discuss what we originally set out to discuss - how to improve on buy and hold investing, Rob Bennett's controversial ideas on "valuation informed indexing", the concept of the safe withdrawal rate, and the state of buy and hold investing.

Every options expiration day (of which Friday was one...) brings another one of these sweet predicting the S&P 500 articles, where I use my ultra-top-secret volatility calculator to tell you where the market is predicting the S&P 500 will move in the near future!

Happy Thursday, readers! I'm delighted to share with you this short story about my entry into the recent Mega Millions drawing. Alas, I didn't win anything, but I'll share this little anecdote with you nonetheless. Skip to the end if you are easily bored by math!

It wasn't that long ago that we featured an article here at Don't Quit Your Day Job about gambling in America. Knowing that 5.566% of our visitors are Canadian (for the record, 70.175% of visits originate from America and .474% are unknown), I figured we should shine our flashlight on the Land of the Loonie.

(For the uninitiated, that's the currency, not a comment on our northern pals).

Do we have a good excuse for not doing this in February? No, we don't. Please, accept our virtual apologies and enjoy our predictions for the closing price of SPY on April 20, June 15, and January 18 (2013)!

We have dealt a lot recently with historically low interest rates and their implications on not only the cost of housing and mortgages, but also implications for consumer credit and inflation. Although we have explained home price affordability in the San Francisco Bay Area before, we haven’t discussed the large variance in regional real estate prices.

Before the primaries move on to Kansas and various territories (the Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Marianas), it's time to take a quick look back at how far the four remaining candidates have come - in both votes and delegates!

We recently talked about paradoxes with insurance and the lottery, but I'm not ready to give up on this topic just yet! I present to you this article which uses IRS data to try to answer: "What is the relationship between gambling and income?".

Most of those comments I've seen on this blog and others seem to imply that the lottery (and most other forms of gambling...) is a game only for the poor - even sometimes referred to as a 'poor tax'. Lucky for the naysayers, the IRS has compiled data which shows that Americans in all income classes (even the 1%!) love to gamble. Yes, in 2009, 284 of the taxable returns with over $10,000,000 in adjusted income had gambling winnings reported! So, dear readers, let's take a look at gambling in the United States...

(... over his first term in office ... if you don't count inflation and population growth ... if you don't consider the whole ten year estimates ... if you count the extended 'Bush Tax Cuts' and AMT Relief in Obama's totals.)