My mid-week morning train WFH reads:
• Pandemic haunts new year as virus growth outpaces vaccines. Despite growing vaccine access, January is looking grim around the globe as the coronavirus resurges and reshapes itself from Britain to Japan to California, filling hospitals and threatening livelihoods anew as governments lock down businesses and race to find solutions. (AP)
• Index-Besotted Institutions Miss Out on Good Deal: Stock Pickers. The investing world is giving its heart to passive investing, and some major institutional investors have been swept along with that feeling. But actively managed investing retains a devoted following among many, who feel that done right it can outpace an index strategy. (CIO)
• There’s no such thing as a local advisor anymore. You might think you have a territory or a region or a town but you don’t. One of the consequences of 2020 that is not yet fully realized within the financial advisory profession is the fact that now 100% of current and potential clients of wealth management firms have become comfortable doing business online and on the phone. (Reformed Broker)
• Inflating inflation part deux Whether it’s goldbugs or crypto bros, the hard money types just can’t help themselves. (FT Alphaville) see also Inflation Truthers: Asset price inflation is not a thing. Risk assets generally go up over the long-term. And anecdotal price increases do not mean government statistics are somehow masking the true nature of inflation. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• What happens if the Senate is equally split after the Georgia runoffs? Even splits in the Senate have happened only 3 times in U.S. history: 1881, 1954, and in 2001. (Washington Post)
• Here are the 24 most exciting electric cars coming in 2021 With the UK ban on new petrol cars less than a decade away, the next 12 months are set to be the busiest ever for an industry accelerating towards an electric future. Here’s our pick of 2021 EVs from A to V (Wired)
• Shots. Into arms. NOW. We are not vaccinating people quickly, and supercovid is coming (Noahpinion) see also Does It Matter Which COVID-19 Vaccine You Get? By the end of this week, the United States could have not one, but two COVID-19 vaccines authorized for emergency use. After nine months of isolation and lockdowns and more than 300,000 deaths, it is difficult to find superlatives to fit this moment. (FiveThirtyEight)
• The Made-Up Conspiracy: A Republican bid to deny Biden’s victory is another worrying Trumpist disinformation ploy (Persuasion)
• 74 of Our Favorite Facts for 2020 Every day, NYT editors collect the most interesting, striking or delightful facts to appear in articles throughout the paper. Here are the most revealing facts of 2020 (New York Times)
• The Day Steph Curry Made 105 3-Point Shots in a Row Suppose Curry has an unworldly 80% chance of making every 3-point shot he takes in practice. Even if he takes 500 consecutive 3-point shots, the chances of making 105 in a row is less than one in 200 million. (Businessweek)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Dave Welling, CEO of Mercer Advisors. The Denver-based RIA has 450 employees and manages more than $21 billion.
US vaccinated around 170 million people in the 2019/20 flu season across all age groups
Source: Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank
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