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Required Return: What Are We Willing to Pay for a Return Nobody Can Promise?
Looking backwards, success can feel inevitable. Looking forwards, it never does. We see the return people eventually received. What we rarely see is everything they had to invest before they knew whether the return would come at all.
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The Cost of Someone Else’s Money: Understanding the Cost of Debt and Equity
Debt has an obvious cost. We borrow money, we pay interest, and eventually we give the money back. Equity is different. There is no interest bill, no repayment date and sometimes no payment at all. So why does finance insist that equity is usually the more expensive one?
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When Does Changing Your Mind Become the Right Decision?
At what point does sticking to the plan stop being persistence and become refusing to respond to what you’ve learned?
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NPV: A Project Can Make Money. But Has It Made Enough?
Profit is visible. The return we gave up isn’t. NPV doesn’t simply ask whether an investment makes money. It asks whether it was worth what we gave up to make it.
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Companies Don’t Maximise Working Capital. But Why Do We Try to Maximise Everything in Our Lives?
At the moment, I have a full-time job. I’m studying for ACCA. I’m building a publication. I want to exercise regularly, spend more time with my partner, family and friends, and occasionally have a weekend where I’m not trying to achieve anything at all. There are a lot of things I want to do. The…
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Why Does Every Business Care So Much About Working Capital?
The formula itself is simple. The decisions behind it are not. Working capital isn’t really about inventory or cash. It’s about deciding where limited resources can create the most value.
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Understanding the numbers, concepts and decisions behind how businesses work.
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Exploring what financial thinking can teach us about decision making in business, work and life
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About
Fallow Lane is a publication about finance, difficult decisions and the lives shaped by them. I write about the decisions behind the numbers, the questions they raise, and what financial thinking can teach us about business, work and life.