Welcome to February! Kick off the new month with our mid-week train WFH reads:
• The Shipping Industry Is Getting a Slew of New Vessels—Right as Demand Cools: Carriers plowed pandemic profits into a fleet of bigger cargo vessels. They’re arriving just as trade growth is softening. (Businessweek)
• The Junkification of Amazon: Why does it feel like the company is making itself worse? (New York Magazine) see also How Amazon Became Ordinary: I still use Amazon a great deal, but much less than I did; I no longer assume Amazon has the lowest price, often compare porices via Google shopping. This is a major shift in consumer behavior. (The Big Picture)
• Independent Watchmakers Surge as Rolex, Patek Remain Unattainable: Horologer Ming is just one of the many brands that’s getting a moment in the sun among collectors who are frustrated with the big brands’ prices and availability—and who are discovering the quality of the small shops. (Businessweek)
• The Forgotten Lessons of 2008: Seth Klarman. Seth Klarman outlines the lessons that investors were quick to forget only two years following one of the greatest financial meltdowns in modern history. (Investment Talk)
• Short Sellers Feel the Pain in Stock Market’s 2023 Rally: Highly shorted shares are beating the S&P 500 this year, and short sellers are down by $81 billion. (Wall Street Journal)
• Americans Are Gobbling Up Takeout Food. Restaurants Bet That Won’t Change. America’s biggest chains test digital-only restaurants and more drive-throughs, gambling that heightened consumer demand for food to go will last well beyond the pandemic. (Wall Street Journal)
• The Private Assets Insurance Companies Want in 2023: In recent years, insurers have been swapping public assets for private ones. Higher interest rates aren’t reversing that trend — just changing it. (Institutional Investor)
• In pursuit of decent coffee: No great stagnation in home espresso. (Works In Progress)
• This woman bakes recipes she finds on gravestone epitaphs: ‘They’re to die for’ Rosie Grant recorded the baking process and posted it on TikTok, “and it exploded,” she said. (Washington Post)
• Mangled Voice-to-Text Messages Are Embarrassing Users: Flubs are so common people have learned to decode the gibberish others send. (Wall Street Journal)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research. He joined RenMac after spending seven years at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, where he was a Sr. economist covering US + Canada. Prior to that, he was a research analyst at Barron’s.
Initial jobless claims show the challenge in getting a firm read on the labor market
Source: Bloomberg
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.
