My back-to-work morning train WFH reads:
• Ken Griffin’s Hand-Picked Math Prodigy Runs Market-Making Empire: Citadel Securities CEO Peng Zhao left for college at age 14, caught Griffin’s eye early in his career and built systems now mopping up market share. (Businessweek)
• The sobering stats behind ‘past performance is no guarantee of future results’: Most top performing managers fail to stay on top, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices. It’s incredibly difficult to construct a portfolio of stocks in a way that beats the competition. Even if you are able to generate industry leading returns in a given year, history says it’s an almost insurmountable task to stay on top consistently in subsequent years. (TKer)
• The Debt Ceiling Dispute Raises the Risks for ‘Risk-Free’ U.S. Bonds: Short-term costs for insuring U.S. bonds are skyrocketing, and the long-term effects of repeated flirtations with debt default are already a burden, our columnist says. (New York Times)
• These companies cynically used global crises to juice profits — and brought us inflation: Throughout all the debate in the last year over what has caused higher prices and how to remedy them, one term hasn’t received the attention it deserves, given how well it explains the trend: “Greedflation.” (Los Angeles Times)
• Artificial Intelligence Is Not Going to Kill Us All: Yes, the fast-growing technology could be dangerous—but A.I. doomers are focused on the wrong threat. (Slate) but see also Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible? (New Yorker)
• The Most Important Machine That Was Never Built: When he invented Turing machines in 1936, Alan Turing also invented modern computing. (Quanta Magazine)
• Using job postings to quantify remote work: The COVID pandemic initiated a rapid, enduring, and largely unprecedented shift to remote work. But there is little evidence to explain where this shift is taking place at a micro level because the sample sizes are too small. This column develops a large-language model that flags postings offering remote work and applies the model to 250 million job postings in five English-speaking countries. The results show a rise in remote-work offerings since spring 2020, with tremendous heterogeneity in levels and trends between and within cities, industries, occupations, and firms. (Vox EU)
• Mark Zuckerberg Has a Problem Even Bigger Than the Metaverse: It’s hard for Meta employees to build something they believe in if they don’t know who to trust. (Slate)
• MSG Is Finally Getting Its Revenge: The much-maligned seasoning could be the secret to eating less salt. (The Atlantic)
• What’s the Deal With Adulthood? 25 Years Later, ‘Seinfeld’ Feels Revelatory. The show about nothing ended in May 1998. But in an era when priorities are being re-evaluated, the sitcom has taken on new relevance. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with venture capitalist and seed investor Howard Lindzon. He is the founder and CIO of Social Leverage, where he makes early-stage investments. He founded Wall Strip (sold to CBS in 2007), co-founded StockTwits (which pioneered the ‘cashtag’ e.g., $AAPL), and was the first investor in Robin Hood. Social Leverage recently launched its 4th fund.
Global Luxury Home Prices Fall for First Time Since 2009
Source: Bloomberg
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