My back-to-work morning train WFH reads:
• What H-A-P-P-E-N-E-D? Sam Bankman-Fried pitched himself as a humanity-saving crypto genius. Then he spent other people’s money to save himself. It’s possible that you don’t fully understand what Sam Bankman-Fried did or what transpired at his company, FTX. This may help. (New York Mag)
• Holiday scam email season is here. Don’t fall for it. Sorry, no one is actually going to give you a free Yeti cooler. (Vox) see also If the Price Ended in 99, You Probably Overpaid: The age-old practice of prices ending with a 9 now serves to camouflage bad deals. (Wall Street Journal)
• Quantum Computing Will Change the World. How to Play the Stocks. Investors finally have ways to play the first radical shift in computing since the 1950s, but you’re better off waiting before jumping in. (Barron’s)
• The S&P 500 is Not the Economy: Technology stocks make up nearly 24% of the S&P 500. And that number is probably understating things since many of the biggest companies aren’t technically in the tech sector. Amazon and Tesla are two of the biggest holdings in the consumer discretionary sector. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• What the Latest Crypto Crash Means for ETFs: The implosion of FTX may have set digital assets back by years, and the fallout is still expanding. (Bloomberg)
• The future of Twitter: Four scenarios: Bankruptcy, a company with a much smaller staff that does little content moderation and allows extremist speech to spread, a company that suffers serious technical problems, or a company with a smaller staff that adds innovative new products and survives the bumpy start. (Brookings)
• Are you addicted to Investment Porn? The hidden dangers for your portfolio: What is Investment Porn? It’s media statements that make investors believe that anyone can become a millionaire in a short time, even with a small amount of start-up capital. From my point of view, however, the statements aiming in the opposite direction also belong to this area, particularly those of the Crash-Prophets. You rarely get rich quick on the stock market. And then only by taking high risks and having a lot of luck. (Onveston Letter)
• The Death of the Key Change: One of the key changes—pun intended—to the pop charts in the last 60 years is the demise of key changes. What happened? (Tedium)
• The Ukraine War in data: After 9 months of war, what the data tells us Facts and figures cannot convey the horror of the war in Ukraine. But they offer perspective and a sense of scope. (Grid) see also For Ukraine, So Much Unexpected Success, and Yet So Far to Go: Ukraine is on the offensive along most of the 600-mile front line, and the Russians are in a defensive crouch. But about one-fifth of Ukrainian territory is still occupied by Russia. (New York Times)
• Why Big Business Can’t Get Enough of the World Cup, Scandal and All: The World Cup in Qatar, which started this week, has been plagued by controversy — and yet companies and countries are tripping over themselves to be part of the show. (Dealbook)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend for a live interview at Bloomberg Invest with Boaz Weinstein of Saba Capital discussing “Whales, Tails & Fails.”
Trend-Following: Why Now? A Macro Perspective
Source: AQR
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