My back-to-work morning reads:
• Vanguard Conquered the ETF World. Where It’s Aiming Next. Salim Ramji, who came over from BlackRock, inherits a firm built on Jack Bogle’s low-cost passive gospel since 1975 — and a challenge nothing like the one Bogle faced.. Here’s how CEO Salim Ramji plans to bring the asset-management company’s low-cost, high-return formula to cash savings, financial advice, and active fixed income. (Barron’s)
• What to Ask When Your Adviser Pushes Private Funds: The questions you need to ask before joining Wall Street’s $2 trillion party. Good questions are every investor’s best defense. Between now and 2030, financial advisers will move some $2 trillion of their clients’ money into alternative funds, consulting firm Cerulli Associates estimates. The questions worth asking before you join Wall Street’s $2 trillion party. (Wall Street Journal) see also Stock-Picking Funds Are Performing as Poorly as Ever Just 13% of U.S. large-cap funds have outperformed indexes over the past decade, new data show; Only 27% of actively managed U.S. large-cap equity funds beat their benchmark passive fund alternatives in the 12 months ended June 30. (Wall Street Journal)
• The Situational Awareness Fund Blow-up: Collateral Damage from Investment Conviction! Lessons from Leo! Aswath Damodaran’s post-mortem on the Aschenbrenner implosion — conviction investing, concentration risk, and the valuation discipline that got skipped. (Musings on Markets)
• Small Businesses Despise Trump’s Tariffs — For Good Reason: Scott Lincicome on the suit filed hours after the July 24 scheme launched, by the same small businesses that had already beaten prior tariff efforts at the Supreme Court. (Bloomberg) see also How Trump’s Next Tariffs Could Drive Companies Back to China: Chad Bown on the irony ahead — new tariffs on 16 trading partners, paired with lower rates on “nonsensitive” Chinese goods. (Peterson Institute)
• She Makes the Impossible Happen for Her Ultrarich Clients: Olivia Ferney grew up a child of schoolteachers in Ontario. Now she’s an expert in private jets, luxury cabanas and champagne-soaked revels. Guy Trebay profiles Olivia Ferney, raised by schoolteachers in Ontario, now fluent in private jets, luxury cabanas and champagne-soaked revels on demand. (New York Times)
• You’re Thinking About Online Trends All Wrong: Jason Parham interviews cyber-ethnographer Ruby Thelot on why virality is a bad proxy for what is actually happening in the culture. From pessimism around dating to AI reshaping culture, cyber-ethnographer Ruby Thelot tells WIRED why people are putting too much stock into things that go viral. (Wired)
• The exodus from Israel: Immigration is at the heart of the country’s self-image. But people have been leaving Israel has had more people leaving the country than immigrating since 2023. James Shotter on Jonathan, who pushed back when his wife first raised leaving — until the war in Gaza, the economic pressure, and the social tensions made the case for him. (Financial Times Free)
• The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized: Paul Krugman on the framing fight in Michigan’s Senate race, and why “socialized medicine” is an odd attack line against a system that already is. And there’s nothing radical about wanting to end insurance company parasitism (Paul Krugman)
• A Landlord Was Cleaning Out a Vacant Apartment — Then He Found a Lost Picasso: Cole Reynolds on Tim Dertz, out $15,000 on a tenant he’d finally evicted, sorting through waist-high pizza boxes when he noticed a dusty print behind the bedroom door. The print wasn’t just any Picasso. In February 2018, it had vanished from a downtown Milwaukee art gallery. (Washington Post)
• Travis Barker Will Drum Until He’s Dead: Vulture’s profile of the hardest-working man in pop-punk — the plane crash, the empire, and the physical toll of never stopping. : “It’s like oxygen for me. I can’t live without it.” (Vulture)
Video of the day: How The Big Short Actually Worked
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Dr. Ankur Crawford, EVP and Portfolio Manager at Alger. She heads the firm’s flagship Alger Capital Appreciation strategies. She was an Engineer at Intel, won the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship, and was awarded fellowship Natl Academy of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine, and holds several U.S. patents. She was recognized as a “Top Women in Asset Management” in 2020 and serves on the board of The Knowledge House, a Bronx-based charity teaching technology skills to underserved communities.
War-driven Inflation: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” – President Trump, November 2024
Source: @charliebilello
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