My Two-for-Tuesday morning train reads:
• How the Worst Market Timer in History Built a Fortune: Over 60 years, he only added new investments at bull market tops: $10,000 each of 13 market tops, from February 1966 to February 2020. (Compound) see also What if You Only Invested at Market Peaks? Meet Bob. Bob is the world’s worst market timer. What follows is Bob’s tale of terrible timing of his stock purchases. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• Hedge Funds Piled On Bullish Pound Bets Just Before Crash: Funds added a net 13,488 long pound contracts last week: CFTC Chance of pound touching parity in 2022 has risen to about 60%. (Bloomberg)
• The tyranny of the supertweeter: Twitter shows us a skewed version of the world, but it’s not necessarily because of the algorithm. (Omnibudsman) see also How LinkedIn Became a Place to Overshare: “This isn’t Facebook,” users complain. But others are finding it a valuable place to talk about much more than work. (New York Times)
• The Fedconomy: Their goal is to slow demand. They want to slow demand because that should theoretically slow inflation. The main mechanism for slowing demand is to make it more expensive for people to exist – higher borrowing costs, slowing wages – so people spend less. Poof, inflation dissipates. (Kyla Scanlon)
• Why all Americans should be paying attention to Puerto Rico’s power grid: Hurricane Fiona showed how improvement efforts remain hampered by years of neglect and mismanagement. (Vox) see also There’s No Reason Puerto Rico Had to Go Through This Again: The most tragic aspect of this week’s catastrophe in Puerto Rico, where Hurricane Fiona has wrecked infrastructure and knocked out electricity for millions of residents, may be that solutions for protecting the island and its population from extreme-weather events like this have been known for years—and none of them have been implemented. (Slate)
• Podcasting Is Just Radio Now: It’s been ages since the last blockbuster narrative show. What does that mean for the medium as an art form? (Vulture)
• For New Yorkers, 6 p.m. Is the New 8 p.m. Why are restaurants in the city filling up at hours that were once unfashionably early? (New York Times) see also How to Have Fun Again: I’ve been in a funk but let’s be real who hasn’t been these days I’m more inclined to stay on the couch then rally for an adventure. (New York Times)
• Long days, long weekends: the four-day week takes off in US schools: The shorter school week is increasingly popular for rural school districts trying to recruit teachers. But what does it mean for students and families? (The Guardian)
• Proud Boys memo reveals meticulous planning for ‘street-level violence’: Document of 23 pages shows the lengths to which the far-right group goes to prepare for potentially violent encounters and exposes the militaristic structure and language it has adopted. (The Guardian) see also Nice Democracy You’ve Got Here. Shame If Something Happened to It. Trump’s newest defense strategy is laced with menace. (The Atlantic)
• Pickleball is exploding, and it’s getting messy: With multiple pro tours and new venues everywhere, pickleball’s growth shows no signs of slowing down (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Steve Case, co-founder of America On-Line (AOL), founder of investment firm Revolution, Char of the Smithsonian, and author of The Rise of the Rest: How Entrepreneurs in Surprising Places are Building the New American Dream.
The British pound is tanking against the U.S. dollar, hitting record lows
Source: Statista
