My morning train WFH reads:
• Worried About the Market? 5 Big Risks and How to Hedge Them. As the market hits new highs, some investors are losing faith. What to do to ease your fears. (Barron’s)
• What Hamburger Helper Knows and GDP Misses: Individual behavior — like millions of decisions about what to have for dinner — is often a better economic indicator than fancy government reports. (The Daily Economy) see also What Declining Cardboard Box Sales Tell Us About the US Economy: Box demand touches nearly every industry, from flat-screen TVs to packaged food, all of which see sales fluctuate based on how flush shoppers feel. (Businessweek)
• FTAV Q&A: Jim Chanos: Wall Street’s most famous short seller on the First Brands fiasco, Enron and the “magical machine” in private credit markets. (Financial Times)
• Grocery Prices Keep Rising. Frustrated Consumers Are Trying to Adapt. Record beef prices and coffee that costs $1 more per pound since May have shoppers cutting back on some foods, stockpiling others. (Wall Street Journal)
• I tracked Amazon’s Prime Day prices. We’ve been played. I would have saved, on average, almost nothing. Here’s what you should do to actually get a good deal on Amazon. (Washington Post)
• Don’t trust AI jobs predictions, says Wharton expert Ethan Mollick: ‘No one knows anything.’ Some evidence of workplace productivity gains from gen AI are emerging, but he says the larger truth is that we still know very little about AI, the job market, and future use cases, and that goes for the biggest AI companies, too. (CNBC)
• Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are: Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now. (The Atlantic)
• Say farewell to the TiVo box, the device that revolutionized how we watch television: Say farewell to the TiVo box, the device that revolutionized how we watch television (Los Angeles Times)
• Is Kansas City Still the Barbecue Capital of America? For the past few decades, the national spotlight has been on the Carolinas and Texas. But the most influential barbecue town may just be Kansas City. (New York Times)
• Taylor Swift’s new album smashes sales records in first week: Success of ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ unprecedented in era of declining music purchases. (Financial Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Liz Ann Sonders, Chief Investment Strategist, Charles Schwab & Co. Named “Best Market Strategist” by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, she is also on Barron’s “100 Most Influential Women in Finance” every year since the list’s inception.
BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF is on the cusp of $100 billion in assets, a milestone it will have achieved in less than two years
Source: Sherwood
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