NOTE: Apologies for the “Critical Error” mess that showed up yesterday. Turns out, it was a WordPress memory issue that has since been resolved…
My morning train WFH reads:
• Anthropic Was Behind. Now It’s the AI Boom’s Front-Runner. After years as also-ran, startup pulls ahead in AI race after focusing on enterprise users and coding (Wall Street Journal)
• We’ve calculated your chances of winning money on Polymarket: WaPo runs the math on Polymarket. Spoiler: the house always wins, but in a more sophisticated way than the lottery. (Washington Post)
• Trillions in Retirement Dollars Flow Into Opaque Trusts: The collective investment trust quietly eating mutual funds in 401(k) plans. Cheaper, less regulated, less visible — pick two. (Bloomberg)
• Appraisal Institute Is Being Sued By Experts In A Dying Field: Jonathan Miller on the appraisal profession eating itself as automated valuation models close in. The lawsuit is symptom, not cause. (Housing Notes)
• GameStop’s $68,000 Charizard Pokémon card saga is wild: GameStop’s foray into trading-card speculation produces one of the funnier markets stories of the year. Truly, this company will sell you anything. (Polygon)
• The Boxing Ring Where a VC Guy Pummels Opponents With Crypto Trades, Not Punches: James Parillo is a venture capital partner by day. At night he dominates a booming underground world of live trading competitions. Silicon Valley fight club where the combat is crypto trades. Peak late-cycle, peak self-parody, and worth reading anyway. (Wall Street Journal)
• Pity the poor billionaires – demands for higher taxes must feel hurtful: Arwa Mahdawi at her sharpest, on the perpetual wounded-billionaire complex. Funny because it’s true. (The Guardian)
• Why saying hello to strangers can be good for you. Studies showing that simply chatting with strangers has a lasting impact: It can make the participants happy. Even smiling and waving hello to a vendor you see regularly can boost your spirits, says psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, who delved into the benefits of social ties after her own uplifting exchanges with a hot dog seller during a time when she was feeling really isolated. (NPR) see also Can having a dog boost your longevity? Here’s what science says. There is some research that suggests that furry friends may improve the health of their humans. Dog owners appear to live longer than non-dog owners, according to quite a bit of research. In a 2019 meta-analysis of nearly 4 million people published in the journal Circulation: Population Health and Outcomes, researchers found that having a dog was linked to a 24 percent lower risk of death from any cause during the study period compared with people who lived canine-free. The evidence is mixed; the experiential return is high. (Washington Post)
• The Democratic Senate Map Doesn’t Look So Bad Anymore: On how Trump’s second term has reshuffled Senate competitiveness in unexpected ways. The expert priors are getting reset. (Zeteo)
• ‘Treats its audience like adults’: why Moneyball is my feelgood movie: The latest in our series of writers paying tribute to their favourite comfort films is an ode to Brad Pitt and Aaron Sorkin’s lovably human baseball drama. (The Guardian)
Video of the day: Why Oil Will Never Hit $200
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Sheila Bair, former Chairperson of FDIC from 2006-11. She helped steer the agency through worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Her new book is aimned at young adults and teenagers, titled “How Not to Lose a Million Dollars”
Will we snap back to the pre-war trend of RoW outperformance if Peace materializes?
Source: Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank
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