Short Takes: $72 million Hoax, Reforming Wall Street, and more

Here are my posts for this week:

Money Rules

Seeking a Reason to Own Bonds for the Long Run

Wealthing Like Rabbits

Here are some short takes and some weekend reading:

The story about some teenager making $72 million day-trading is now confirmed to have been made up. It would be interesting to know how many people believed this story when they first read it. I didn’t. I know it’s easy to use 20/20 hindsight to convince yourself you knew it all along, but I made a point of saying I didn’t believe this story when it first hit. Balancing the likelihood of a publication making such a big fact-checking mistake against the likelihood of some teenager crushing the markets in such an extreme way, I went with the publication screwing up as much more likely.

Michael Lewis has some entertaining ideas for reforming Wall Street.

Canadian Couch Potato explains that the real value of limit orders is protection from wild markets rather than price haggling. He also did a good job of explaining ECN fees.

Big Cajun Man reports that the older you are the less likely you will follow through on your New Year’s resolutions.

SquawkFox explains that she maintains a low-cost diversified portfolio and doesn’t really care about all the stock market gyrations in 2014.

My Own Advisor says you need to save more than 10% of your income. This generated quite a stream of comments.

Robb Engen at Boomer and Echo has pushed his estimate of when he’ll reach financial independence from age 40 to age 45. For his sake, I hope this estimate is more accurate. If every 5 years you have to push your estimate out another 5 years, the projection doesn’t look good.