10 Wednesday AM Reads
My mid-week morning
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Millions of Christmas presents may arrive late because of Postal Service delays Unprecedented package volume has paralyzed the agency, leading managers to divert vast shipments of mail across the country. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy tried to screw up the election, he managed to screw up Christmas instead. (Washington Post)
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What If You Only Invested at Market Peaks? There were some lean times in there, especially in the aftermath of the Great Depression. But by and large, the long-term returns even from the height of market peaks look pretty decent. If you have a long enough time horizon and are willing to be patient, the long-run remains a good place to be when investing in the stock market. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
10 Sunday Reads
Avert your eyes! My
• Lie of the Year: Coronavirus downplay and denial Lies infected America in 2020. The very worst were not just damaging, but deadly. President Donald J. Trump fueled confusion and conspiracies from the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic. He embraced theories that COVID-19 accounted for only a small fraction of the thousands upon thousands of deaths (PolitiFact)
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How Offshore Oddsmakers Made a Killing off Gullible Trump Supporters The betting markets were not good predictors, but they weren’t trying to be. The online bookmakers that fielded bets on the election saw their largest single-event windfall ever. To understand why, you need to understand election betting and Donald Trump supporters. Offshore sportsbooks do not share detailed financials, but the 2020 election appears to have been the biggest online betting event in at least American history, to say nothing of what licensed bookmakers in Europe mi
10 Weekend Reads
The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of
El Borbollón coffee, grab a seat by the fire and get ready for our longer form weekend reads:
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How Science Beat the Virus in fall of 2019, exactly zero scientists were studying COVID‑19, because no one knew the disease existed. By the end of March 2020, it had spread to more than 170 countries, sickened more than 750,000 people, and triggered the biggest pivot in the history of modern science. Thousands of researchers dropped whatever they were doing and began working on the pandemic instead. In mere months, science became thoroughly COVID-ized. (The Atlantic)
10 Friday AM Reads
My end of week morning
train WFH reads:
WeWork’s Mad Messiah
Billion Dollar Loser tells the tale of the rise and quasi-fall of Adam Neumann, founder and erstwhile CEO of WeWork, the real estate leasing firm that somehow managed to pass itself off as a startup unicorn to rival the likes of Uber, and which by early 2019 was valued at $47 billion, despite never having made a profit, and having no proprietary technology of any significance. It is rich in high grade weirdness. (UnHerd)
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What a $32 Million Dinosaur Can Tell Us About This Year’s Art Auctions The top of the auction market is never a great indicator of how the art market is doing; it’s like trying to gauge the strength of the U.S. car market by looking at Bugatti sales. This has always been true, and it’s particularly salient during the pandemic as jittery sellers turn to pre-arranged (and publicly untraceable) private sales instead of riskier public auctions. Still,
10 Thursday AM Reads
My morning
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Will Markets Defy Gravity in 2021? 10 charts examining if 2020’s trends will be your 2021 friend Financial assets, from stocks to bonds to Bitcoin, have responded by rallying to record highs. Hopes that vaccinations can replace lockdowns as the best defense against the coronavirus are feeding expectations that the trend mostly is likely to continue in 2021. (Bloomberg)
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The 5 Phases of a Bubble Bubbles should be viewed through the lens of every asset bubble in history, because human nature is the constant. The problem for investors is you never know how long each phase lasts in real-time. There is no iPhone alert to let you know when the period of euphoria is coming to an end. (A Wealth of Common Sense)