1995: "If that glove don't fit, you must acquit!"
2017: "If the case is old, you must be paroled!"
OJ Simpson was granted parole, and will likely be free in October … in related news the Browns are looking for a strong running back.
… Fake news isn't limited to politics.
Here is a peek at what I've been reading lately. These are the links I saved this week.
Hope you find some interesting and enjoyable tidbits.
Let me know if you read something I'd like … Or if there are other sources I should add to my weekly reading.
Thanks.
Lighter Links:
Market-Related Links
- The Financial Industry Needs to Start Planning for the next 50 Years, Not the Next Five. (HBR)
- Quant Funds that Chase Trends are this Year's Biggest Losers.(Bloomberg)
- How to Think like an Economist (If, that Is, You Wish To…) (Bradford-Delong)
- Inflation Forecast. (CXOAdvisory)
- Building Modern Monopolies, with Alex Moazed [Invest like the Best, EP.25]. (Investorfieldguide)
- Jeremy Corbyn, Emmanuel Macron and the Age of Volatility.(NewStatesman)
- 2Q 2017 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. (ValueWalk)
- Quant Vs Traditional Investors, and How Alphas Become Betas [Podcast]. (ValueWalk)
- The Alternative to Alternative Data for Investment Managers.(ValueWalk)
- Elon Musk Says Artificial Intelligence is the Greatest Risk We Face as a Civilization'. (Fortune)
- Extracting the Signal from the Noise: 7 Tips for Interpreting Macroeconomic Data. (MilkenReview)
- Beating the Odds: JumpStarting Developing Countries.(MilkenReview)
- Gas Guzzlers' Gains in Fuel Efficiency Go Farther Than Fuel Sippers' Do. (Wall Street Journal)
- Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future. (WaitButWhy)
- Disentangling Cycles from Time. (MainStay)
- The Volatility of Bitcoin. (SSRN)
- The Absolute Dominance of the U.S. Economy, in One Chart.(MarketWatch)
- Legal Marijuana Market to Create Nearly 300,000 Jobs by 2020.(24/7 Wall St)
- The Older Population: Where the Money Is. (CFAInstitute)
- Why 90%+ of Active Stock Fund Managers Underperform the S&P 500. (ElliottWave)
Let me know what you think.
Thanks.
– Howard
Uncategorized
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Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading – July 9th, 2017
I hate to admit it … but this is how I watched fireworks this year.
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.
- When Neurology Becomes Theology. (Nautilus)
- 'Magical' Warfare Technologies and the Persistence of False Beliefs. (VoxEU)
- Who Really Needs to Be Gluten-Free? (New York Times)
- Machine Learning: The Past, Present, and Future by Tom Dietterich. (BigML)
- The Mathematical Corporation: Where Machine Intelligence and Human Ingenuity Achieve the Impossible. (BookReview)
- Machines Now Dominate Stock Trading and It's Having Unexpected Consequences. (BI)
- China May Home Prices Gain 10.4% in May, Dip from April's 10.7% Rise. (CNBC)
- Chinese Stocks Could Attract over $400 Billion in Flows, BlackRock Says. (CNBC)
- Prada Sells $185 Paper Clip, and Twitter Can't Hold It Together. (CNet)
- 3 Stocks to Hold For the Next 50 Years. (FoxBusiness)
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Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading – July 2nd, 2017
As always – it's artificial stupidity that scares me, not artificial intelligence.
InspiroBot attempts to design "Inspirational Posters" for you … but it doesn't always do a great job.
But it is pretty fun to play with.
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.
- We Need Critical Thinking Now More Than Ever. (Google's Eric Schmidt)
- Did Jerry Jones Ask the Pope to Help the Cowboys Win a Super Bowl? (CBS)
- No Royal Wants to Be King or Queen Says Prince Harry. (Mashable)
- Democrats Just Went 0-4. When Will They Win? (CNN)
- The U.S. Just Picked Intel, IBM, Nvidia and Others to Help Make Supercomputers 50 Times Faster. (FastCompany)
- Big Prize in Amazon-Whole Foods Deal: Data. (Wall Street Journal)
- IT'S WAR: Walmart is Telling Vendors to Stop Using Amazon's Cloud. (Insider)
- Saudi Arabia’s Strains. (Bloomberg)
- How Long Was China Communist? (AndrewBatson)
- The Force That’s Reshaping the Global Economy Has Big Implications for the US Dollar. (BlackRock)
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Reasons to Travel to Indonesia: Expensive Cat Poop Coffee?
My wife is from Indonesia, so we often go to visit her family.
As a result, I often have new and exotic experiences …
That picture was taken in Bali, where I first met my wife many years ago. Bali holds a lot of good memories for me, but Indonesia has more to offer than just Bali.
Indonesia is the largest Muslim country, but it also has famous Hindu and Buddhist temples as well – including the world's largest Buddhist temple – Borobudur in Java.
When you hear "Java" you think Coffee … and for good reason.
Indonesia is famous for coffee. For example, "Sumatra" is their biggest island – with “Java” coming in close behind.
They also make one of the most expensive coffees in the world … Kopi Luwak.
It's a "special" coffee … made using a very particular process.
In traditional coffee production, the cherries are harvested and the beans are extracted. The beans then get shipped to a roaster, ground into a pulp, and brewed by a barista at your local Starbucks.
In contrast, with Kopi Luwak, something different happens.
The coffee cherries are still harvested, but by wild animals.
Specifically, they’re harvested by the Asian Palm Civet, a small, cat-like animal that absolutely loves the taste of those cherries.
But, if the civets eat the cherries, how can they still be used to make coffee?
Well … that's the gross part.
The civets eat the coffee cherries, but their digestive tract can’t effectively process the beans, only the flesh surrounding them.
When the partially digested, partially fermented beans are eventually excreted, coffee producers harvest them. The beans are then cleaned, roasted, and used to make astonishingly expensive (“with retail prices reaching up to $700 per kilogram”) coffee.
Now is the coffee that mind-blowing to warrant a price north of $300 a pound?
No, not really. In fact, many critics will openly call it bad coffee, or as Tim Carman, food writer for the Washington Post put it, "It tasted just like…Folgers. Stale. Lifeless. Petrified dinosaur droppings steeped in bathtub water. I couldn't finish it."
To be fair, the Luwak coffee industry is an experience. When I toured a plantation near Ubud, Bali, a smiling tour guide greeted and led me on an in-depth exploration of the forested property, where I was allowed to immerse myself in the various spices, roots, beans, and civets used to produce this one-of-a-kind coffee. Here is a video I shot of the process.
via YouTube.
If you think about it, I paid a premium to drink exotic cat poop coffee, but I certainly wouldn't drink coffee made from people poop (or even domestic cat poop).
So, why would I buy the coffee then?
It’s the story that allows this not so awesome coffee to fetch awesome prices. People are paying for the experience, not the commodity itself.
The same is true when you buy Starbucks. The coffee at 7-Eleven is cheaper – and Consumer Reports tell us that McDonalds coffee is better.
Nonetheless, I'd still rather drink at Starbucks.
We live in an Experience Economy.
Can you think of anything else where you're buying the story/experience without actually getting a superior product?
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Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading – June 24th, 2017
McDonald's hit an all-time high after announcing that kiosks would be replacing cashiers …
That plus this 400-burger-per-hour robot means teenagers have even less of a chance to land a job in retail.
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.
- 7 Questions that Lead to an 'Aha' Moment, According to Research. (Inc)
- Google’s New Chip is a Stepping Stone to Quantum Computing Supremacy. (TechReview)
- 27 Quotes to Change How You Think about Problems. (Flipboard)
- Even AI Creators Don't Understand How Complex AI Works. (BigThink)
- Elon Musk Lays out Plans to Meld Brains and Computers. (Wall Street Journal)
- What Some Very Smart Hedge Fund Managers are Saying about this Market. (Flip)
- Brick-and-Mortar Stores are Shuttering at a Record Pace. (Wall Street Journal)
- 3 Reasons FinTech is Thriving. (Forbes)
- McKinsey: Mounting Dry Powder is Nothing to Worry About. (Institutional Investor)
- Hedge Fund Assets Rise Again with Quants Leading the Way. (ValueWalk)
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Getting Close To The Seat of Power – Weekly Links – June 23rd, 2017
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Lighter Links:
Market-Related Links:
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A Father’s Day Investment Guaranteed to Pay Dividends
My kids are getting older. In fact, they're officially both adults. So Father's Day looks a little different than it used to.
As I look back, there is an investment I made that paid-off in a big way, and I want to share it with you.
Like many parents, I wanted to teach my children that, to a large extent, they control what happens to them. One of the first ways I did that was to set up a "compensation system" for them to earn video games.
Some parents try to limit the amount of time their kids spend watching TV or playing video games. I tried something different. Instead, my kids earned their games by reading books. Here is a photo from way back then.
Paid With Play.
Here's how it worked. When they were younger, 10 books was enough to earn a small game. When they finished a book, it was their right, and my obligation, to take them to the bookstore for us to pick up the next book together. Likewise, when they finished the requisite number of books, it was their right, and my obligation, to take them to the computer store or game store for them to choose any game they wanted.
When they finished hundred books, they got a bonus of earning the next game system. That meant if they had a Nintendo, they could now also get a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.
How Can You Encourage a Jump to the Next Level?
There came a point when I wanted one of my sons to start reading grown-up books. He was comfortable reading a certain type of book, and didn't want to read the kind of books that I read. So, I created a bonus system that counted a particular book as three books. I didn't force him; I just let the easier path to a reward "whisper" in his ear what to read. Once he finished that, he never went back to teen fiction.
It Is a Great Way to Learn About Your Kids.
I also used the bookstore visits to get a sense of how the boys were doing. For example, I might say "I notice that you read five books in that series, maybe you'd like this book". Or, "That sure is a lot of science fiction; what was the last biography you read?" For the most part, though, I didn't care what they read. The key was to get them to want to choose certain books for their own reasons. Ultimately, their preference meant they were learning to love reading.
It Puts Them In Control of Their Destiny and Rewards.
My younger son likes competition. He also broke or misplaced many things. So, in order to earn back the Game Boy unit that he lost, I challenged him to read five books in five days. These weren't easy books either. It was designed to stretch him, and also to teach him that he could read a book a night. The bet was that he either finished all the books in the allocated time, or none of them counted towards games or Game Boys. On the other hand, if he read a book a night for two weeks, not only would he get to have his Game Boy back, the books would count towards a game too. It worked like a charm, and we were both happy.
So, Who Got the Better Bargain?
As they started to get into their teenage years, I needed to up the ante a little. So, 500 books meant they got a laptop of their choice. Both boys cashed in, and probably felt like they were taking advantage of their dad.
I got what I wanted, though; both my boys love reading, and know that they can accomplish anything they put their minds to … one step at a time.
That's an investment that will pay dividends for a long time.
Happy Father's Day.
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A Legendary Performance – Weekly Reading Links – June 9th, 2017
Lighter Links:
Market-Related Links
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Invented or Discovered?
Nature can be pretty cool!
It turns out a lot of what we think human's "invented" was so natural that nature thought of it first.
Take a look at the British Planthopper that has mechanical gears in it's legs.
Or the fact that the T4 Bacteriophage looks like a lunar lander and has 20 sides.
via biology4u
It's interesting that some of man's greatest inventions are so innate that natural selection (or intelligent design) created it before we did.
Want another example?
Hospital-acquired Infections are diseases caught due to bacteria or fungi at a hospital(or other healthcare related areas). They account for over 99,000 deaths a year.
Because of that, R&D worked extensively to find bacteria-killing surfaces … turns out Dragonflies have been doing it for centuries.
Research companies (and dragonflies) have been using nano-textured surfaces to create a "bed of nails" that destroys bacteria by puncturing the cell wall.
If you like stuff like this, Check out this link on order vs. chaos.
There is always opportunity around you … You just have to know where to look.
