My mid-week morning train WFH reads:
• Meme Stocks Mired in Longest Losing Run Since Frenzy Began Retail investors who fueled a basket of meme stocks to meteoric heights are getting pummeled by waning enthusiasm for their favorite high-flying stocks. 37 meme stocks tracked by Bloomberg fell 0.5% on Monday, marking a sixth straight decline, after its worst week since late February. The basket’s longest losing streak since taking Wall Street by storm. (Bloomberg)
• Billboard’s U.S. Money Makers: The Top Paid Musicians of 2020 A year with minimal touring resulted in top-streaming acts, many of them hip-hop artists, replacing the rock and country acts that fill arena and stadiums on Billboard’s annual ranking. Taylor Swift tops the list. (Billboard)
• How the Stock Market Works If there were no risk, there would be no wonderful long term returns. And because there is risk involved when owning stocks, your returns can vary widely depending on when you invest in the stock market. (Wealth of Common Sense)
• The Bond Market Loves New Jersey. Yes, New Jersey. Now New Jersey is one of only seven states with an improving economy over the last 3 1/2 years, measured by employment, personal income, home prices, tax receipts, mortgage delinquencies and the equity of their companies. It’s the only one of those seven with perennial leadership in public education and health care. (Bloomberg)
• The Economic Risks from Anti-Vaxxers The risk here is we create a two-track economic recovery: A robust recovery for the vaccinated, and a weaker economic recovery for unvaccinated regions. This divergence will deepen the economic divide between regions, states, even countries. (The Big Picture) see also Virus Headwinds Hit Wall St. After Months of Smooth Sailing But the virus’s potential to upend life all over again caught up with investors, as a spate of worrying news — in particular, new outbreaks involving the highly contagious Delta variant among unvaccinated people — led to a big sell-off on Monday (New York Times)
• Is the U.S. Economy Too Hot or Too Cold? Yes. The economy is a riddle, but clearly it’s having a harder time rebooting itself than had seemed possible in the spring. (Upshot)
• People Want To Work, They Just Don’t Want To Work For You When people treat those they’re hiring with distaste because they demand remote work, or say that people “don’t want to work,” it’s because they either lack self-awareness, either in how their business runs or how they conduct themselves. (Ed Zitron)
• Are American Companies Better than European Ones? The Europeans don’t have any FAMANGs, but they dominate luxury (LVMH, L’Oréal, Hermes) and spirits (Diageo, Heineken, Pernod Ricard, and Anheuser Busch); Then there is IKEA, which basically has no peer. For every P&G there is a Unilever, for every Mondelēz a Nestlé, Boeing an Airbus, Nike an Adidas, Cargill a Vitol, GM a Volkswagen, GE a Siemens, Pfizer a Roche, and for every ExxonMobil or Chevron or Phillips, there is a BP, Shell, or Total. (Albert Bridge Capital)
• Bringing The Metaverse & NFTs Back To Earth: The hype never ends when it comes to cryptocurrencies. These days, the Metaverse and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have the spotlight. Like their predecessors (blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum) they carry intimidating labels and lofty promises brandished by their supporters. Let’s explore these topics in order to assess their investment merits, if any. (The Integrating Investor)
• The sky is filled with rivers of darkness When astronomers talk dust, they mean tiny grains of material floating between the stars. These wee bits might be silicaceous (rocky), or they might be countless long-chain carbon molecules that are essentially soot. Both are made when stars swell up into red giants or explode as supernovae, and this material is everywhere in space. (Syfy Wire)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview with Matt Ishbia, CEO of United Wholesale Mortgage. UWM is the number 1 wholesale lender and the number 2 overall mortgage lender in the nation. The firm went public in the biggest SPAC ever (UWMC) this year. Ishbia is also the author of “Running the Corporate Offense: Lessons in Effective Leadership from the Bench to the Boardroom.”
Pandemic Economic Contraction Was Shortest Recession on Record
Source: NBER
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