My end of week morning train WFH reads:
• Money Managers Race to Launch First U.S. Bitcoin ETF After SEC Signal While the regulator has indicated being receptive to exchange-traded funds for bitcoin futures, there are risks for individual investors (Wall Street Journal) but see Why Bitcoin is Doomed What makes a distributed network secure against attack is the costly redundancy built into the system (whether that redundancy is competing miners in a Proof of Work system or competing validators in a Proof of Stake system). (The Attic)
• India Quietly Readies an Amazon Slayer — Open E-Commerce New Delhi is closing another door that would allow U.S. tech giants a chance to do business in the last billion-people consumer market still open to them. (Bloomberg)
• Waymo Is 99% of the Way to Self-Driving Cars. The Last 1% Is the Hardest The world’s most famous autonomous car shop has lost its CEO and is still getting stymied by traffic cones. What’s taking so long? (Businessweek)
• The IRS has a big opportunity to fix the way Americans file taxes You shouldn’t need TurboTax to file your taxes. The IRS can and should make its own service. (Vox)
• Billionaire N.Y. ‘Bottom Feeder’ Buys Malls as Others Run Away Igal Namdar has made a fortune buying shopping malls no one else wants. He scoops up struggling centers most prominently aging malls in small cities at bargain-basement prices after their landlords lose faith, betting he can turn a profit before the last tenants turn out the lights. So far, that strategy has netted big gains — as well as lawsuits accusing Namdar of allowing his real estate to slide into disrepair. His empire of 268 properties in 35 U.S. states, Namdar has accumulated a personal net worth of about $2 billion. (Bloomberg)
• Why NFL Stars Are Showing Up to NFL Training Camps—and Not Practicing Star players unhappy with their contracts used to skip preseason entirely. Now, new rules coerce them into attending. So they just demonstrate their displeasure at the team facilities instead. (Wall Street Journal)
• Dissecting the Unusual Biology of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant An ability to build up higher concentrations of viral particles in people’s airways and mutations that might boost its ability to infect human cells could be what gives the Delta variant its evolutionary edge. (The Scientist) see also Living and dying with covid How the world is grappling with yet another major coronavirus surge (Washington Post)
• Vast Stretches of America Are Shrinking. Almost All of Them Voted for Trump. 90% of counties that lost population in the last decade backed the ex-president. (Slate)
• I Went to Iceland to Learn What’s Up With Their Elves The relationship between Icelanders and elves is a complicated one that can fall somewhere between faith and folklore, depending on who you ask. (Vice)
• The 21 Most Exciting Young Musicians on Planet Earth In search of music’s voices of the future, each of GQ’s 21 global editions nominated a local artist across a world of genres—from J-pop to flamenco, rap to reggaeton—to show us who’s shaping the zeitgeist and defining the sounds of tomorrow. (GQ)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Fran Kinniry, who is a principal in the Vanguard Investment Strategy Group, and became Global Head of Private Investments at investing giant Vanguard Group in 2019. Kinniry is behind the drive to bring Private Equity investments to Vanguard’s 401k investors.
Stock issuance highest ever, as firms and Wall Street know when it’s time to sell to eager buyers
Source: GMO
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