My back-to-work morning train WFH reads:
• You’ve Never Seen Super Bowl Betting Like This Before: Prediction markets are turbocharging America’s obsession with sports gambling. (The Atlantic)
• The Coming Crypto Apocalypse. The future of money and payments will feature gradual evolution, not the revolution that crypto-grifters promised. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies’ latest plunge further underscores the highly volatile nature of this pseudo-asset class; one only hopes that policymakers will wake up to the risks before it’s too late. (Nouriel Roubini)
• Who is America’s Largest Landowner? The Land Report 100 Research Team analyzes transactions and scours records to determine America’s leading landowners. That’s how we broke the news in 2020 that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was America’s largest farmland owner with more than 260,000 acres. That’s how we identified Shanda Investment Group founder Tianqiao Chen as the owner of almost 200,000 acres of Oregon timberland in 2024. It’s one of the many reasons why news organizations worldwide rely on the Magazine of the American Landowner to understand this asset class. (Land Report)
• Is It Really a Good Sign When Executives Buy Their Own Stock? We Ran the Numbers: We looked at 1,400 insider purchases over the past five years to find out whether they give share prices a boost. (Wall Street Journal)
• AI ‘slop’ is transforming social media – and a backlash is brewing. “I would say AI slop increases the brain rot effect, making people quickly consume content that they know is not only unlikely to be real, but probably not meaningful or interesting,” he says. (BBC) see also The AI Trade Is Entering a New Era of Skepticism: A selloff in software and data analytics stocks reveals growing fears AI tools could cannibalize established industries. Stock Market Survives AI Panic, Even as Tech Collapses. It’s a Monster of Our Own Making. (Barron’s)
• How the Capitalists Broke Capitalism: In a financialized economy, businesses become mere sources of cash, assets to be manipulated and then operated for maximum investor returns. Workers become just another cost, like lumber. Customers are just revenue streams to be tapped. (New York Times)
• The Economic Costs of Brexit on the UK. Ten years on, the economic cost of Brexit has been larger than analysts predicted and that prolonged policy uncertainty contributed importantly to the magnitude of the impact. Understanding the ways in which Brexit resulted in a drag on economic growth for the United Kingdom provides potential lessons about the costs of abruptly pulling back from the global economy for other countries. (Econofact)
• FBI Couldn’t Get into WaPo Reporter’s iPhone Because It Had Lockdown Mode Enabled: Lockdown Mode is a sometimes overlooked feature of Apple devices that broadly make them harder to hack. A court record indicates the feature might be effective at stopping third parties unlocking someone’s device. At least for now. (404 Media)
• People’s Choice: Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2026: Organizers of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest are inviting the public to vote for their favorite images from this year’s competition. (The Atlantic)
• Efforts to Ground Physics in Math Are Opening the Secrets of Time: By proving how individual molecules create the complex motion of fluids, three mathematicians have illuminated why time can’t flow in reverse. (Wired)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Bob Moser, CEO and founder of Prime Group Holdings, a private investor in unique real estate holdings. They created Prime Storage, one of the largest, privately-held self-storage brands in the world, with over 19 million rentable square feet of space and 255 locations across 28 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The firm has acquired over $10 billion in real estate assets.
Software relative to the S&P 500 is a particularly brutal chart … essentially 6 years of relative gains wiped out
Source: @KevRGordon
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