The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee, grab a seat by the fire, and get ready for our first longer form weekend reads of the new year!
• 20 striking findings from 2020 As 2020 draws to a close, here are 20 striking findings from Pew Research Center’s studies this year, covering the pandemic, race-related tensions, the presidential election and other notable trends that emerged during the year. (Pew Research)
• How to avoid bear markets There’s a very simple way to avoid bear markets. What you do is pull all of your money out of the stock market and just let it accumulate in your bank account. Others will make huge fortunes as sustained bull markets carry on for hundreds of percentage points for years on end. Those people who participate will be forced to endure regular ten, twenty and even thirty percent drawdowns along the way. They will feel uncomfortable during these drawdowns. They might have even looked bad for a while. (Reformed Broker)
• The Best Income Investments for 2021 Investors can still forge together an income-friendly portfolio even with rates hovering near historic lows. 12 places to look (Barron’s)
• The Uncertain Future of Corporate HQs The question of where to locate corporate facilities has been increasing in strategic importance for a long time. Corporations were facing a rising backlash to their perceived effects on housing prices and gentrification in superstar cities and tech hubs, and from attempts to hoard taxpayer-financed incentives — a backlash that is only likely grow (Harvard Business Review)
• The pandemic could have crushed WeWork. It may have saved it instead. How do you make a business out of sharing office space when no one is going to the office? A company that rents out trendy shared and private office space, WeWork has made a number of critical changes that have helped it hold on while facing a pandemic that kept people home and away from offices. Some of the most important changes, however, happened before the coronavirus took hold. (Vox)
• Washington’s Secret to the Perfect Zoom Bookshelf? Buy It Wholesale. Books by the Foot curates shelves full of books for Washington offices, hotels, TV sets—and, now, Zoom backdrops. (Politico)
• The Better Letter: Lessons Learned Neurath, 2020 lessons, and baseball “We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.” (The Better Letter)
• It Took a Pandemic to See the Distorted State of College Sports In 2020, COVID-19 laid bare the harsh reality of the NCAA: Revenue sports don’t prop the whole thing up—they *are* the whole thing. (Sports Illustrated)
• A Nation’s Economy Divided: Breadlines vs. Bread Makers The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare how divided the U.S. economy really is (Businessweek)
• ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ said goodbye 25 years ago. Here’s why Bill Watterson’s masterwork enchants us still. “Calvin and Hobbes,” one of the greatest strips ever to grace newspapers, blazed across the pages for a beautiful decade before heading off into the white space of our imaginations, trusting us to continue the next adventures in our heads. And to this day, the creation — once syndicated to 2,000-plus papers — is ever-present on bestseller lists, in libraries and nested on home shelves within easy reach of nostalgic adults and each next generation of young readers.(Washington Post)
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.
Interesting summary of 2020 events
Source: @ontologify
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