Part Two: When Tudor polymath John Dee meets a man who claims he can speak with angels, his path to understanding the universe suddenly becomes clear. At their instruction, the pair begin searching for the fabled philosopher’s stone. But the angels grow increasingly demanding, and soon Dee must confront a terrible ultimatum.

Centuries later, a strange incident in a French town suggests that angels may still be with us.

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A key source was The Diaries of John Dee (1998), edited by Edward Fenton. Several other books were very useful:

John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy and the End of Nature (1999) by Deborah Harkness

The Years of the Wizard: The Strange History & Home Life of Renaissance Magicians (2025) by Rachel Morris

The Arch-Conjuror of England (2011) by Glyn Parry

The Secrets of Alchemy (2012) by Lawrence M. Principe

Prophecy: Prediction, Power and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI (2026) by Carissa Véliz

The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee (2002) by Benjamin Woolley

The following websites and articles also helped us tell John Dee’s story:

“Phantom pregnancy: The mental health condition that mimics a baby’s arrival” by Rosemary Counter, National Geographic (11 September 2023)

“Some Workmen’s Wages in 1588” by Elizabethan.org

“A robot in Prague and an elixir for Rudolph II” by Habsburger.net 

“John Dee: Elizabethan 007, scientist, magician and spy” by History Extra (8 October 2021)

“Nothing But Solitude” by Christopher P. Heuer, Lapham’s Quarterly (14 May 2019)

“Mathematics, navigation and empire” by Alex Grover, Royal Museums Greenwich (8 July 2019)

“Martin Frobisher’s North West Passage expedition 1576–78” by Royal Museums Greenwich

“The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth” by A. L. Rowse, History Today (May 1953)

“Elizabeth I’s Coronation Procession” by Tudor Times (16 August 2019)

“John Dee and Edward Kelly: Through a Glass Darkly” by Michael Wilding, The Brazen Head (18 October 2020)

I previously wrote about predictions here and about Dan Kahan’s work here. For more on “badges of membership” see “Climate-Science Communication and the Measurement Problem”, Advances in Political Psychology (20 February 2015) by Dan M. Kahan and “Identity: Dan Kahan” by Informal Science.

For the story of Gilles D’Ettore, we drew on the podcast series The Mystic and the Mayor (2025), as well as the following articles:

“French town reels from fortune teller scandal” by Chris Bockman, BBC (27 May 2024)

“«Se faire flouer ainsi par une prétendue voyante…» : l’affaire du maire d’Agde «ensorcelé» sidère” by Christian Goutorbe, Le Parisien (23 March 2024)

“Comment le maire d’Agde est tombé sous l’emprise d’une voyante ventriloque et la voix de « l’archange Michaël »” by Samuel Laurent, Le Monde (18 April 2024).

“France’s ‘swinger’ capital rocked by fortune teller scandal” by Harriet Marsden, The Week (4 June 2024)

It was a testament to the persuasive power of an apolitical nerd. The audience realised that this insurance analyst had no interest in the Woke Dems — he was just describing the world as he saw it. But it was also a window into the way that our views about the world shape financial markets for risk, and financial markets for risk shape our views about the world.

There are two venerable insurance industries, the French economist Michel Albert once explained. One has its roots in Alpine pastures, where Swiss villagers agreed to help each other out if one farmer’s cow died. The other was born in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in 17th-century London, where sailors and shipowners would gather to gamble on which ships would sink and which would return safely to port.

Today we call both of these activities “insurance”, but they have very different souls. The Swiss version is all about mutual assistance, figuring out who is part of a community and who is not, and sharing burdens. The London version begins with the insight that some risks are fun, but also that people like to be smart about those risks.

Edward Lloyd himself created a network of well-informed correspondents across the ports of Europe and published a newsletter specialising in maritime cargo and foreign affairs. Cuthbert Heath, a Lloyd’s underwriter from the late 19th century onwards, went on to specialise in acquiring the data needed to sell insurance against losses from earthquakes and hurricanes. Selling well-priced insurance is a lucrative business, and the better the information and judgment about future risks, the better the business will be.

Financial risk contracts have long provided incentives to improve the state of our knowledge. In the 16th century the inveterate gambler Girolamo Cardano revolutionised our understanding of probability, while in the 17th the comet guy Edmond Halley used data on births and deaths gathered in Breslau to demonstrate that the government was selling life annuities too cheaply. A decade ago, I saw an agricultural insurance expert tell agribusiness traders something they didn’t know about climate change. It is all part of the same process.

With this noble tradition in mind, perhaps we should not be surprised that prediction markets are taking off. They are not new; in 2003 the Pentagon had been pondering a “Policy Analysis Market” in which people would trade on the risk of — say — a deadly terrorist strike, or, um, attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. The idea that the US intelligence community might host such a market was a political non-starter and the plan was dropped.

Yet the controversial idea made some sense. Prediction markets collect information by offering money for it. Markets may not be perfectly efficient but they are often informative: if you want to understand whether Arsenal’s lead in the Premier League table is commanding or precarious, the betting odds are a good place to start. Prediction markets, like any betting market, aggregate information.

The mood music, and the rules on gambling, have changed since 2003. Prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket have become well known for offering contracts on all sorts of events, ranging from “Will Jerome Powell be arrested in 2025?” to degenerate nonsense such as “Will Jerome Powell say ‘Good afternoon’ during his December 2025 press conference?”

The libertarian in me says that people should be allowed to bet on pretty much anything, but the economist in me has some concerns. Of course, there is a worry — or there should be — that some people find gambling ruinously addictive, especially with smartphones putting a slot machine in every pocket.

But we should also be concerned that in trying to predict the future, we change it for the worse. It might indeed be useful to get a sense of whether Jerome Powell will be arrested, because it matters if he is. It does not matter whether he says “Good afternoon”, so there is little benefit in such a market existing. The market in “Good afternoon” does, however, create the clear risk that somebody tries to bribe or threaten Powell.

That is probably the least of his worries, but it is not hard to find examples of betting markets corrupting the real world. The most obvious cases are of crooked sports bets, where athletes rig games for their own benefit — or the benefit of people who are bribing or threatening them. It’s not even necessary to throw a match: it’s possible to bet on all sorts of trivia that are only peripherally related to the result.

Or consider Emanuel Fabian, The Times of Israel journalist who was offered bribes, then death threats, to change his report that an Iranian missile had struck near Jerusalem on March 30. A great deal of money was — courtesy of Polymarket — riding on the question of whether Iran had or had not succeeded in striking Israel. Without his consent, Fabian found himself forced into the perilous role of refereeing which side had won the bet.

Fabian’s plight is one of those things that, with hindsight, was obviously bound to happen. Whether prediction markets mean that athletes are being threatened if they don’t change a game, or journalists are being threatened if they don’t change a news report, this all seems like something that could be better thought through.

It would not be the first time that a new, disruptive industry smacked headlong into a problem that the stodgy old incumbents have understood for a very long time. In the early 1960s, life insurers were alarmed to discover that they were paying vast sums in compensation for “loss of limb” to policyholders in the Florida panhandle. One fellow lost a foot; fortunately he had a tourniquet with him . . . and insurance from several dozen different companies. Another chap bought insurance then shot off his own foot just 12 hours later “while aiming at a squirrel”.

There’s an old-fashioned phrase for this: moral hazard. And perhaps some old-fashioned caution is in order. Betting on the future can protect us from risk, and it can make us smarter about risk too. But it can also corrode and corrupt. Let’s be careful.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 15 April 2026.

In Tudor England, the line between mathematics and the mystic arts is vanishingly thin. Straddling both worlds is John Dee, a brilliant scholar and astrologer whose intellect grants him access to the highest circles of power. Dee navigates the politics of the court by making bold prophecies, which win him royal favour. But even correct predictions may come with a price – and laying claim to the future is a dangerous game. 

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A key source was The Diaries of John Dee (1998), edited by Edward Fenton. Several other books were very useful:

John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy and the End of Nature (1999) by Deborah Harkness

The Years of the Wizard: The Strange History & Home Life of Renaissance Magicians (2025) by Rachel Morris

The Arch-Conjuror of England (2011) by Glyn Parry

The Secrets of Alchemy (2012) by Lawrence M. Principe

Prophecy: Prediction, Power and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI (2026) by Carissa Véliz

The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr Dee (2002) by Benjamin Woolley

The following websites and articles also helped us tell John Dee’s story:

“Phantom pregnancy: The mental health condition that mimics a baby’s arrival” by Rosemary Counter, National Geographic (11 September 2023)

“Some Workmen’s Wages in 1588” by Elizabethan.org

“A robot in Prague and an elixir for Rudolph II” by Habsburger.net 

“John Dee: Elizabethan 007, scientist, magician and spy” by History Extra (8 October 2021)

“Nothing But Solitude” by Christopher P. Heuer, Lapham’s Quarterly (14 May 2019)

“Mathematics, navigation and empire” by Alex Grover, Royal Museums Greenwich (8 July 2019)

“Martin Frobisher’s North West Passage expedition 1576–78” by Royal Museums Greenwich

“The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth” by A. L. Rowse, History Today (May 1953)

“Elizabeth I’s Coronation Procession” by Tudor Times (16 August 2019)

“John Dee and Edward Kelly: Through a Glass Darkly” by Michael Wilding, The Brazen Head (18 October 2020)

Alarums and Excursions, or A&E, was a quixotic project even by the standards of 1975. It was an Amateur Press Association, which meant that contributors would produce their own fanzines — a few pages of articles, ideas, fiction, art and comments on the zines of others — and then Gold would assemble them into a 100-page-plus compilation encompassing a vast variety of typefaces, layouts, writing styles and even paper colour. (Gold took on the project in part because the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society’s weekly zine was being overrun by articles about a brand new game, Dungeons & Dragons.) The maximum size of each issue was defined by the size of Gold’s stapler, and she mailed out the zine-of-zines compilation to all contributors and to anyone else willing to pay for a copy.

Back in 1975, that was a practical way to publish niche ideas, and the back-and-forth between different contributors made A&E a kind of proto social-media community, vastly slower and more thoughtful than the 21st-century version. Zines were technologically superseded by electronic bulletin boards, blogs, YouTube and social media (G+, Google’s shortlived answer to Facebook, was a huge source of game-design chat for a while). But Gold kept going anyway, and so did her contributors. A&E had some thin years, but in the issues before its demise it had been as voluminous as ever. We are all yearning for a bit more analogue in our lives, so zines are back.

Some of the hobby’s leading designers (Robin Laws, Mark Rein-Hagen, Jonathan Tweet) cut their teeth as readers of or fanzine writers for A&E. The leading professional role-playing magazines, Dragon and White Dwarf, were both outlived by A&E. Dragon stopped print in 2007 after 359 monthly issues; White Dwarf is at 522 and counting, but we role-playing purists would suggest that it stopped covering the hobby decades ago to focus on miniatures and war-games.

Gold’s achievement is all the more impressive given the boneheaded sexism she faced. In 1976, Gary Gygax — co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, and the most powerful man in the hobby — phoned Gold under the misapprehension that she was male.

“You’re a woman!” Gygax said when Gold picked up the phone and identified herself.

“That’s right,” she replied, adding how grateful she was that Gygax had created D&D.

“You’re a woman,” he said again. “I wrote some bad things about women wargamers once.”

Gold recalls telling him, “You don’t need to feel embarrassed. I haven’t read them.”

“You’re a woman,” Gygax repeated. Gold said goodbye and hung up.

Despite being a role-playing game fan since issue 108 or so, I was never a subscriber to A&E. I was nevertheless brought up short when I heard that A&E was stopping. There is something truly remarkable about such epic persistence.

There are longer-running projects, of course. The Herald, The Times and The Observer all date back to the late 1700s. The White Horse of Uffington, a monument in the Oxfordshire countryside, is 3,000 years old. Like a newspaper, it needs to be endlessly renewed or it will disappear. Indeed, as with A&E, the community-building ritual required to scour the horse white may be more important than the physical product. In some cases, the process, rather than the result, is the purpose.

Not always, though. At Rothamsted in Hertfordshire, crop experiments have been running continuously from the mid-19th century to investigate the long-term sustainability of certain farming practices. The Framingham Heart Study in the US has been studying the effects of diet, exercise and medications on heart disease since 1948, and is now looking at the grandchildren of the original 5,209 participants. In such endeavours, the longevity of consistent data is valuable in part because it is so unusual.

But while scientific projects derive much of their value from sheer longevity, in the case of more human-scale creative projects there is something powerful about the fact that they simply cannot last for ever. The end of an endeavour such as A&E, like the death of a centenarian, only serves to underline the achievement.

A parallel that immediately sprang to mind was photographer Nicholas Nixon’s unforgettable series of portraits, The Brown Sisters. The first in the series was made at almost exactly the same moment as the first issue of A&E, in the summer of 1975. Nixon captured four young sisters — Mimi, 15; Laurie, 21; Heather, 23; and his wife Bebe, 25. Every year, he made another group portrait. Each photograph is well-executed, but you wouldn’t necessarily look twice at it in a gallery. What is remarkable is the relentless passage of time, unsparingly recorded as the sisters pass 40, 50, 60. It’s a memento mori to beat any of those Renaissance depictions of skulls: you can’t look at the series without conjuring in your mind the first heartbreaking portrait in which only three sisters remain.

“My intention would be that we go on for ever . . . just take three, and then two, and then one,” Nixon once said. But he stopped the project in 2022, with all four sisters still alive — if wrinkled and far closer into the lens. The project could have continued, I suppose. Nixon could have emulated the Framingham study and included children and grandchildren, recruiting his own replacement to make portraits until 2075 and beyond. But no: it is the contrast between the longevity of the work and the mortality of the subjects that gives the portraits so much power.

A&E, likewise, could have continued. It is after all a collective endeavour, the sum of all the fanzines within it. I asked Lisa Padol, a game designer and long-term A&E contributor who assembled a collection of tributes to Lee Gold, why A&E was stopping. She told me that Gold simply felt too much ownership to hand over the beloved name of Alarums and Excursions to someone else.

That is understandable, but the work will continue under a new name: E&A, or Ever and Anon. Perhaps it will become gaming’s Herald — or its Uffington White Horse?

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 8 April 2026.

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Further Reading

The Admiralty Regrets by Lt. Charles Warren and Sub Lt. James Benson.

Mike Lynch was often lauded as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates. Born into a working-class family, Lynch’s incredible intellect and passion for computers led him to become a billionaire tech entrepreneur.But behind the scenes, Lynch was a bully who couldn’t bear criticism and was prone to creative accounting. When computer giant Hewlett Packard bought his company, Autonomy, it triggered one of the biggest fraud scandals in Silicon Valley history. Tim talks to Katie Prescott, Technology Business Editor at The Times and author of the book The Curious Case of Mike Lynch, about the lessons we can take from a story no one could have predicted.

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What sort of signal? First, and most obvious, the signal to consumers to cut back. Anything with oil in the supply chain — from petrol to plastic to fertilised crops to package holidays — will become more expensive. The signal is to reduce when you can, because carrying on as usual will cost money. Maybe holiday nearer home this year; maybe find someone to share car journeys with. Maybe pull on a cardigan and turn down the central heating.

Or maybe none of these things. Unlike ration books or speeches by Jimmy Carter, price signals don’t tell anyone what to do; they change the incentives and we are all free to act, or not, depending on our own circumstances and preferences.

A second signal is to producers to look for ways to save energy in their production process. The low-hanging fruit will probably have been plucked already, but higher oil prices shift the calculus. Energy-saving measures that once seemed too difficult may now make sense. These measures are often simple reflections of the trade-off involved in using expensive energy, such as bundling deliveries together to save fuel, or switching off the patio heaters in the pub garden.

The third signal is to substitute away from oil and towards other energy sources. Disruption to the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz is good news for the makers of batteries and solar panels . . . and coal miners. If it lasts, or recurs, it may even be good news for the builders of nuclear power stations.

These energy-saving and oil-saving substitutions will, in the short-run, simply involve picking existing technologies and techniques off the shelf. But the same signal will also reach the world of science and technology. In 2002, the economist David Popp published a study of “induced innovation”, tracking the response by inventors to the oil shocks of the 1970s.

The oil price leapt in 1973 and surged further in 1979, before sliding lower throughout the early 1980s. Popp found that patent activity tracked the oil price — for example, there were 10 successful patent applications in the field of solar energy in 1972, but more than 100 in 1974 and about 300 a year in the late 1970s. As the oil price fell back, so did patent activity, with fewer than 50 successful solar patents a year from the mid-1980s onward.

Popp found that a similar story could be told for batteries (a natural complement to solar energy), and patent applications for deriving liquid and gaseous fuels from coal. In each case, the few years of high oil prices led to a few years in which oil-saving patent activity was also high.

Today’s high oil price sends more signals: to find oilfields outside the Gulf region; to build new pipelines and tanker ports that are further from harm; to find ways to defend vulnerable shipping. In fact, there are far too many to list, and that is the point: a price signal — which, of course, is also a monetary incentive — is an invitation to everyone, everywhere, to do things a little differently.

One result of all these signals twitching across the nervous system of the global economy is that catastrophic shocks are often less catastrophic than they first seem. We can adapt quickly when we have to. The 2008 banking crisis is a salutary counter-example, but we have seen many examples of apparently grievous economic harm — from earthquakes to typhoons to regional wars to Covid-19 — in which the damage was cushioned by smart operators swiftly finding profitable workarounds and alternatives.

Please indulge me in delivering this extended public service announcement, because while it will not surprise many readers of the FT, it may be news to the next person you talk to. Certainly, if governments around the world are any guide, the lesson that prices are signals to watch rather than evils to suppress has not been repeated quite often enough. All too frequently, the governmental instinct when voters are leaning on a hot stove is to inject a dose of anaesthetic rather than help them leap to safety.

The most infamous example is President Richard Nixon’s decision to freeze wages and prices in the US in the summer of 1971. Although many prices were liberalised again after 90 days, some were not — and the price of gasoline remained under government control for years. Some of the consequences were obvious: artificially cheap fuel meant long lines at the pump, and people wasted fuel as they drove around looking for more fuel.

Other consequences of price caps were obvious only in hindsight. Chicken farmers faced a price cap on the chickens they sold, but the price of chicken feed was anything but. This turned every chick into a lossmaking asset. Farmers smothered newly hatched chicks by packing them into airtight barrels, telling journalists that “the more we produce, the more we lose”. Did the price of chicken burgers fall as a result of this grim waste? Of course not.

Another unexpected problem, highlighted in a new working paper from economists Brian Albrecht, Alex Tabarrok and Mark Whitmeyer, is that in 1974 gasoline was in short supply in the big cities but “more than abundant” in rural areas. As Albrecht and colleagues point out, this is a natural consequence of constraining the price system. Since fuel sells at the price cap everywhere, why bother to pay the additional cost of delivering it to an urban area? Only when the gas stations near oil refineries are drowning in more petrol than they can sell will the tankers head to more distant markets.

Closer to home is the vast sum Liz Truss pledged to prevent energy bills from rising in late 2022, estimated at the time to be not far off the annual budget of the NHS. Households were encouraged to burn scarce gas, and the UK lives with the fiscal consequences.

Prices are the nervous system of the global economy. That sharp pain we are all feeling is the response to a series of injuries that few of us cared to risk, but which were inflicted on us anyway. That’s annoying — and for some, more than merely annoying. But now we need to clean the wounds and stop the bleeding, not beg for enough fentanyl to end the pain.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 1 April 2026.

Well, it’s been a long road since I raced the dinosaurs at a New Year’s Day parkrun. I’ve managed various niggles (knee, glute, achilles… yawn). I’ve run around the amazing Ladybower Reservoir, across St Mark’s Square, even chased Alistair Brownlee down Regent’s Park Canal. (He is faster than the dinosaurs.)

And tomorrow: it’s my first marathon. Quite possibly my only marathon. I’ve done the training, watched the videos, eaten the pasta, digested the data. I’m fairly terrified but I know it’s a privilege to be able to run in this event – for everyone who gets to run, about 20 people don’t get their chance. So I’m going to enjoy it. Or at least, try to appreciate it.

I feel lucky to have the opportunity to run in memory of those who do not. In particular I’m thinking of my cousin Winnie, who died last April at the age of 20.

Winnie was always positive and upbeat despite enduring enormous suffering with little hope of a happy ending, so I think I should be able to cope with a few hours of sore legs. People have been so, so generous – but if you feel inclined to support the Teenage Cancer Trust, please do. The TCT was a huge support to Winnie and her family and your donations will help them support other families facing a very difficult, lonely road. Thank you.

As for me, the road tomorrow will no doubt pose a few challenges but it certainly won’t be lonely. And since I’m now up to £650 per mile run I have plenty of incentive to keep going.

Dick and Mac are content with their lives: they enjoy making burgers by day and stargazing by night. Ray Kroc is a workaholic chasing success at any cost. When the brothers’ folksy charm collides with Kroc’s ruthless ambition it will birth one of the best known brands in the world. 

This is the story of two very different approaches to making hamburgers – and two very different approaches to making money.

This episode was previously released to members of the Cautionary Club, and Pushkin+ subscribers. For ad-free listening, a monthly video chat, newsletter and full-length episode – and to support Cautionary Tales – please consider becoming a member of the club.

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Further Reading

This script relied on Ray Kroc’s autobiography, Grinding it Out, and two books on the two burger franchises – McDonalds: Behind the Arches, by John F Love, and Flameout: The Rise and Fall of Burger Chef, by John McDonald – as well as the textbook An Introduction to Franchising, by Robert Webber.

The bare facts of the matter are these. In 1999, Bonilla was past his prime, but under his contract, the Mets still owed him just under $6mn. Bonilla agreed that instead of $6mn immediately, he would accept almost $30mn deferred. It would be paid in 25 annual instalments of over $1mn, every July 1, starting in 2011. Each July 1, Mets fans grumble or joke about Bobby Bonilla Day, the saddest holiday in the year. Bonilla retired a quarter of a century ago — and the Mets still owe him 10 more million-dollar-plus paydays.

It is not only Mets fans who hate this. Business Insider described it as “the worst contract in sports history”. Yet anyone with an economics training would shrug. As Planet Money points out, anyone who managed to invest $6mn at a 10 per cent rate of return in 1999 would have nearly $19mn by 2011. At that point, the investment pot would generate more than enough income to pay Bonilla his 25 annual instalments, leaving the principal sum to grow further. In other words, if the Mets could find a 10 per cent return on their money, they could shake hands with Bonilla, invest the $6mn, pay every penny of the $30mn they owe him, and have tens of millions of dollars left over in 2035 when the agreement expires.

So there was nothing stupid about the Mets agreeing to the deal. Maybe Bonilla was the one being stupid? Probably not. The deal with the Mets locked in an 8 per cent return for him at very low risk. Not bad; good enough, anyway.

The first lesson here is that most people do not understand the power of compound interest. Outraged Mets fans feel that their team got their faces ripped off by Bonilla and his agents; they didn’t. It just seems contrary to all logic and reason that $6mn now could possibly be worth $30mn later, but a few decades and an annual return in the high single digits will do wonders. (Many FT readers will already know the simple rule of thumb: divide 72 by the growth rate, and that is how many years your money will take to double. Seven per cent will double in about 10 years; 10 per cent will double in about seven. I mention this only because I am endlessly surprised at the number of mathematically gifted and trained people who don’t know this cognitive shortcut.)

The second lesson is about the psychological pain of debt. One of the reasons that Bobby Bonilla Day seems so egregious to the Mets fans is that Bonilla is still receiving cheques such a long time after he retired. This is, of course, literally how a pension works — but it also illustrates how annoying it can be when some shiny purchase-on-credit is gathering dust, yet the payments come through month after month. Some things are worth borrowing to pay for, but it’s also worth thinking ahead.

The third lesson is that even in what seems to be a zero-sum negotiation, there are often gains from trade to be found. The Mets wanted to pay as little as possible, and Bonilla wanted to be paid as much as possible, but there was still room to make both sides happy. The Mets urgently wanted the $6mn, while Bobby Bonilla didn’t. Professional baseball players are generally rich and young, have no particular skills in investing and are vulnerable either to sharks or to their own worst impulses. Bonilla didn’t want to bankrupt himself trying to invest his $6mn somewhere. He just wanted to retire and relax, knowing that he had a regular income locked in. It suited both Bonilla and the Mets to agree to defer the payments.

A fourth lesson is that some risks cannot be made to disappear, or are so costly to insure that few people would bother. Bonilla’s deal exposes him to three of those risks: longevity, inflation and counterparty risk.

Longevity risk is simply that while the payments expire in 2035, Bonilla probably will not. If he dies before the payments stop in 2035, he won’t get to enjoy the benefits of a contract that could have paid him in full in 1999. Conversely, he might easily live until 2045 (when he will be 87). That would mean scraping by for a decade without those nice cheques every July 1.

Inflation risk might not have seemed worth worrying about when Bonilla agreed the deal in 1999, but it is real. A cheque for $1mn today buys about as much as a cheque for $500,000 in 1999 — and that is after subdued inflation for (most of) the last quarter century. If the 2010s had been a rerun of the 1970s, with inflation typically between 5 and 10 per cent a year, the purchasing power of Bonilla’s annual cheques would have spectacularly shrunk by now. The moral of the story is that any long-term contract agreed in nominal terms contains a hidden bet on the inflation rate.

Bonilla also faces counterparty risk: the risk that the Mets somehow can’t or won’t pay. Thankfully, Bonilla has a plan B: he’s been collecting $500,000 a year from the Baltimore Orioles since 2004.

It’s good to see Bonilla being held up as a case study in retirement planning. Compound interest seems very abstract. What makes it real is seeing Bonilla turn $6mn into $30mn by the simple exercise of deferred gratification.

I must confess that the particular maths of Bonilla’s contract did strike close to home. He agreed to wait 12 years in exchange for receiving a further 25 years of annual income. I’m 52, so such a deal would pay me between the ages of 64 and 89, which sounds pretty much perfect as far as retirement plan timing goes.

Regrettably, nobody owes me $6mn. But if I could invest an extra £6,000 now — and earn an 8 per cent return somewhere — that would boost my retirement income by £1,000 a year. Fifty-two is later than ideal to be planning for retirement, yet still not too late.

What’s that, I hear you say? You were promised five lessons?

Here is the fifth: the Mets spent their $6mn on a new pitcher and reached the World Series; then they reinvested all the proceeds of their success. The fellow they put in charge of the investment was Bernard Madoff, the most famous Ponzi fraudster since Ponzi.

All that compound growth looks great in the spreadsheet, but in investment — as in life — nothing is certain.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 25 March 2026.

I’m running the London Marathon on 26 April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.