My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:
• The Dow Is Close to 50,000. How the Heck Did We Get Here So Fast? The Dow Jones Industrial Average took 103 years to reach 10,000, in 1999, after starting at 40.94 in 1896. Milestones at 20,000, 30,000, and 40,000 occurred in rapid succession starting in 2017, with decreasing fanfare. The Dow is now approaching 50,000, with annualized gains of 6.4% from 10,000 in 1999. (Barron’s)
• Google is trying to take down a group sending you all those spammy texts: A new lawsuit details what allegedly happens after you click that fake USPS link. (The Verge) see also The hidden, horrifying world behind all those recruitment scam texts: The people likely to be sending them are victims, too. (Vox)
• A Winning Investment Strategy Sitting Right Under Your Nose (If You Can Hold It): It works to buy stocks after they’ve gotten wrecked. (Morningstar)
• Trump Is Falling Into the Same “Affordability” Trap That Ensnared Biden: Republicans learned nothing from how badly Dems bungled inflation. Turns out it’s easy to win while running as an outsider promising “affordability.” It’s much harder to actually do anything about it. (The Bulwark)
• Why Gen Z Hates Work: When you spend hours each day watching influencers get rich without much effort, you forget what it takes to succeed in this world. (The Free Press)
• How two tiny banks are helping Trump’s sons build a crypto empire: Dominari Holdings and Yorkville Advisors are benefiting from close connections with Eric and Donald Trump Jr. (Financial Times)
• When Will We Make God? The key driver of the AI Bubble. Hyperscalers believe they might build God within the next few years. That’s one of the main reasons they’re spending billions on AI, soon trillions. They think it will take us just a handful of years to get to AGI—Artificial General Intelligence, the moment when an AI can do nearly all virtual human tasks better than nearly any human. They think it’s a straight shot from there to superintelligence—an AI that is so much more intelligent than humans that we can’t even fathom how it thinks. A God. (Uncharted Territories)
• People don’t want to visit the U.S. Can this new ad convince them otherwise? A new ad campaign aims to sell an idealized America to increasingly skeptical travelers. (Fast Company)
• How do you move a village? Residents of France’s last outpost in North America try to outrun the sea As rising tides eat away at the Saint-Pierre and Miquelon archipelago off Canada, plans to move the historic village to higher ground have divided residents. (The Guardian)
• Ben Stiller Was Hollywood’s Funny Guy. But He’s Always Been Serious. He’s best known as a comedy star who defined the Gen X sensibility. But what he really wants is to work behind the camera. (Wall Street Journal)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Bankim “Binky” Chadha, Chief US Equity & Global Strategist and Head of Asset Allocation at Deutsche Bank Securities, a role he has held since 2004.
Bonds are not as positively correlated to equities as they were in 2022, they are no longer negatively correlated either.
Source: Jurrien Timmer, Fidelity Investments
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