Welcome to December! Our end-of-week morning train WFH reads:
• S&P 500’s Historic 8.9% Rally Blindsides Skeptics on Wall Street: The US stock market just posted its best month in almost a year and a half, and one of its best Novembers in decades, defying skeptics and fueling hopes for more gains to come. (Bloomberg)
• Dimensional Fund Advisors Reaps $100B More in Assets With ETFs: The firm has $100 billion in assets under management in its nearly 40 exchange-traded funds, even though it entered the business only three years ago. DFA’s push into ETFs has been more successful than even they expected. (ETF.com)
• The annoying — and hard to solve — problem of stolen packages: A thoroughly modern nuisance for consumers, shippers, and retailers alike. (Vox)
• New Billionaires Are Inheriting More Wealth Than Creating It — And Shaking Up Portfolios: Over the coming decades, about a thousand billionaires will pass on an estimated $5.2 trillion and the inheritors have their own plans for those assets. (Institutional Investor)
• Twitter Is Worth More to Elon Musk Dead Than Alive: Musk will never make Twitter worth anything near what he paid for it, but he can use it to make himself a free-speech martyr and recast his own business failures as an ideological stand against censorship. (Slate) see also Linda Yaccarino’s Very Unmerry X Mess: The former NBCUniversal ad sales chief thought she could manage the mercurial Elon Musk. Her former colleagues are baffled at the result: “She let her ego get the best of her.” (Hollywood Reporter)
• Three Ways to Tell If Research Is Bunk: Here are some rules for deciding whether a new social-science finding is really useful to you. (The Atlantic)
• Where could millions of EV batteries retire? Solar farms. A Southern California company is showing how repurposing EV batteries for stationary storage can extend their usefulness for several years. (Grist)
• This Cheap Street Fix Saves Lives. Why Don’t More Cities Do It? “Daylighting” intersections to improve visibility for drivers is an effective way to make crosswalks safer for pedestrians. Here’s why it works so well.. (Citylab)
• What Henry Kissinger wrought: One of America’s most important statesmen gave the world a series of diplomatic breakthroughs, and hundreds of thousands of bodies. (Vox)
• If an octopus is so smart, should you eat it? Just as we begin to understand cephalopods’ brains, seafood companies want to farm them commercially. (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Michael Fisch, founder and CEO of American Securities. The private equity firm manages $27 billion in client assets.
2024 is likely to be the first year that Gen Z makes up a larger share of the full-time workforce than Baby Boomers
Source: @DanielBZhao
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