10 Friday AM Reads

June 5, 2015 7:30am by

The week — and a heckuva week it was — is almost over. Our reserved, aisle-seat morning train reads ready for your perusal:

• Eastern Exchanges (New Yorker) see also A goring concern: The economic dangers of China’s manic bull market (The Economist)
• What Twitter Can Be. (Lower Case Capital)
• Collender: You’re Wrong If You Want To Reduce The National Debt (Forbes)
• Scientists dismissed “hot streaks” in sports for decades. They were wrong. (Vox) see also What’s It Like To Be a Teenager in the NBA? (Basketball Insiders)
• Bill Gates, College Dropout: Don’t Be Like Me (The Upshot)

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  1. hue commented on Jun 5

    Warriors, Come Out & PlayAye: How Golden State Courted Silicon Valley — And Why The Love Is Mutual http://onforb.es/1T0F5IL i lived in SF during the first internet(s) boom, Chris Mullin (later coached?), Marc Jackson (the coach), Vinny DelNegro (another coach), Awtoine Jamison, Tim Legler (ESPN talking head), Billy Owens (talented bust), Terry Cummings (the preacher) to name a few on that team. saw a few games at the empty Oakland Coliseum, the valley and everyone were too busy daytrading Qualcomm and JDSU. such long memories. supported, sold out for 40 years, right!

    Wasn’t firing Jackson for Kerr a cultural fit? lol worked out this time, Kerr is the bomb

    Between the Hedges (not at Sanford Stadium): Hedge fund managers unload on Gladwell after he trashes Paulson http://read.bi/1FZn6vj the comments said Gladwell is a one percenter, what does he give from his high horse? lol. my fave: “The only thing I get from all of this – Don’t be Poor. You will be in a viscous downward spiral with no hope to escape.”

    As far as improving “humanity through education”: other than the drop outs, Gates and Zuckerberg, & Al Gore the Internet inventor, Havid produces nothing but POTUS (2 Adams 2 Roosevelts, Dubya and Barry Soweto) SCOTUS and gov’t peeps (wiki http://bit.ly/1Gc85HV) i thought Wall Street and the right hate the f_cking gov’t lol

    OK the graduates include Blankfein, Thain Jeffery Skillings Tony Hsieh, Schwarzman Ballmer McNealy, Kristof & Krauthammer

    The Ten Commandments for Wall Street Interns http://on.wsj.com/1JrnWVx moneybeat or beating money

    • hue commented on Jun 5

      Lol chillax (I hate that f_ucking word) it’s a second level thing, you have to get the smear, to get the joke

    • hue commented on Jun 5

      How is my lib cred? Last week I donated to Emily’s list lol

      Not because I care.,I think I was on a gore email climate thing 10 years ago and now Emily spams me daily begging. Worked adder several years

      Don’t know how Victoria’s Secret got my email tho

      Wish I could donate to Ellen Jamesians lol

      Sorry BR

    • catclub commented on Jun 5

      Gladwell put his argument badly, but I agree that Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached to it.

      It seems misguided when gifts that primarily benefit rich people (Harvard, Opera, Symphonies)
      are still tax deductible. I have cut back on my giving to my college (Swarthmore) after I visited recently.

      Food for the Poor. Habitat for Humanity.

    • rd commented on Jun 5

      Actually, the GOP legislators are hoping that the Chinese hackers will finally uncover Obama’s real birth certificate and make it public.

    • willid3 commented on Jun 5

      and oddly enough a lot of this and that IRS breach were likely made a lot easier to do by all of the business that have been hacked. after all, there have been how many hundreds of million of customers data being hoovered up by hackers from the Targets of the world. and for which there is 0 than we as individuals can do about it. so while the feds got hit this time, you can expect that your employer will be next

    • rd commented on Jun 5

      The Canadians will be pleased if the House precludes Americans travelling to Cuba. They aren’t looking forward to the influx of American tourists on what has been an almost private tourist island for them.

  5. rd commented on Jun 5

    An interesting column looking at innovation vs. market valuations.

    http://awealthofcommonsense.com/

    I think one error made in these is thinking a company is a product or process (Google = search; Blackberry
    = phone). I believe an investable company is actually a management team and culture. A process or product can go obsolete quickly, so it must be refreshed frequently, even if only perception of it (Coke). In some cases, the companies look nothing at all like their first products (GE).

    Blackberry and Palm were selling products. Once they lost their product edge, their management couldn’t recover. Meanwhile Amazon used its bookstore to fine-tune an entire process as well as an adaptable culture to keep pushing the margins. Its big challenge will be if Jeff Bezos can pass its adaptable culture down to a future generation the way GE has been able to do over the past decades.

    The modern corporation and concept of selling stocks on a stock exchange has arisen as a major economic force during the Industrial Age. The past 150 years has been a period of constant innovation and change. Despite that the general valuation rules have fallen within fairly well defined bounds. Major deviations from those are generally punished severely over the ensuing years. It is hard to say that the pace of innovation today is significantly greater than after the first steam engines appeared permitting motorized industrial production, steamships independent of wind and current, and railroads. Entire continents opened up in the 50 years after railroads showed up. Globalization for the average consumer took off in the 50 years after the first steamships.

    • willid3 commented on Jun 5

      while products can do become ‘obsolete’ it only really happens if the management and culture allow it too. Kodak and Poloroid come to mind. along with a few others, course with today’s ‘management’ complete focus on the short term, just about all of them are only short term investments arent they? and see management seems to have figured out how to game the stock market, and pay themselves outsized compensation, while letting the companies fail slowly. its very few companies that could qualify as a real investment today

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