Weekend Reads for Advisers: Twitter, Retirement, and the Shutdown Showdown
One story that got my attention this week came from the Guardian: Sometime in the first half of 2014, the Financial Times will launch a single edition, global print product. In a memo to staff, editor Lionel Barber said: “The 1970s-style newspaper publishing process — making incremental changes to multiple editions through the night is dead. In future, our print product will derive from the web offering — not vice versa.” As journalist Roy Greenslade points out, the “path-breaking changes to the production of its printed newspaper” appear to be “the penultimate step towards becoming a digital-only publication.”
Or, as Felix Salmon put it:
The FT bows to the inevitable http://t.co/iV1LG3PLZA
— felix salmon (@felixsalmon) October 9, 2013
We are all consumers of information, and how we get that information is changing and will continue to evolve. One can’t help but wonder what the media landscape and our digital devices will look like a few years from now. What devices will we be using? How will digital technologies influence how we process information?
We are happy to read our books on devices, but are we happy with devices doing the reading? http://t.co/f9PxMeul5j
— Nautilus Magazine (@NautilusMag) October 10, 2013
And now, here are some other interesting articles from the past couple of weeks, in case you missed them.
Investing/Twitter
- “Fidelity Billionaire Johnson Taps ETFs as Profits for Funds Fade” (Bloomberg)
- “How Investors Lose 89 Percent of Gains from Futures Funds” (Bloomberg)
- “The Worst Investment in the World” (Inside Investing)
- “I Am a Risk Factor for the Twitter IPO” (The Financial Times)
- “A Woman to Serve on Twitter’s Board? Here are 25” (Bits)
- How much could a single post on Twitter be worth? How about $1 billion? Or maybe $6 billion? “Using Twitter to Move the Markets” (The New York Times)
RT @researchpuzzler: @AswathDamodaran does his usual thorough approach, this on a little company called Twitter http://t.co/Dqx6J4VuTd
— Lauren Foster (@laurenfosternyc) October 6, 2013
Work Culture/Trust
- Reform school for bankers? Goldman Sachs, the world’s leading investment bank, puts itself under the spotlight (The Economist)
- At work, are you given an opportunity to be more than you thought you could be? Here’s the Corner Office interview with Michael Gould, chief executive of Bloomingdale’s. (The New York Times)
Retirement
- “New Rules Could Revive Reverse Mortgages” (MarketWatch)
- America’s pension system ranking slid in latest Melbourne Mercer Global Pension Index, to 11th place from 9th a year ago, among 20 countries ranked. (Mercer)
- “Lessons for Private Sector Retirement Security from Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands” (National Institute on Retirement Research)
- “Pension Lessons from Down Under: Australians Could Teach Americans a Thing or Two about the Benefits of Reform” (The Wall Street Journal)
- “Australia’s ‘DIY’ Pension Funds Ring Regulatory Alarm Bells” (Reuters)
- “Global Greying” (Pieria)
The Single-Family Office Business
- Russ Alan Prince, president of R. A. Prince & Associates and co-founder of Private Wealth magazine, has published a three-part series on how to become a multimillionaire running a single-family office: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. (Forbes)
- Last month, he wrote about the top three motivations for establishing a single-family office. (Forbes)
The Partial Government Shutdown and the Debt Ceiling
- “Debtors’ Prison Is No Place for Country Like US” (Bloomberg)
- “What A US Default Would Mean For Pensions, China, and Social Security” (PlanetMoney)
- Can a new mathematical model predict the endgame of empires? Peter Turchin says his work shows why the United States is in crisis, and what will happen next: “The Maths That Saw the US Shutdown Coming“(NewScientist)
- Knowledge@Wharton asked several of the school’s top negotiation experts for their ideas on how to solve this impasse. Their assignment: Come up with a mechanism, or mechanisms, that could bring about a solution acceptable to both the Republicans and Democrats. (Knowledge@Wharton)
- Dysfunctional government surpasses economy as top US problem, according to new Gallup poll. (Gallup Politics)
- “The US Debt Ceiling Crisis Explained” (The Guardian)
- “Americans Prefer Hemorrhoids, Witches, and Fungus to Congress” (CNBC)
- “Can Science Stop Government Shutdowns?” (NewScientist)
Fiduciary Duty
And Now For Something Completely Different
- It costs nothing to click, respond, and retweet. But what price do we pay in our relationships and our peace of mind? “The Attention Economy” (Aeon)
- “Teaching Me Softly: Machine Learning is Teaching Us the Secret to Teaching” (Nautilus)
- “Can Indifference Make the World Greener?” Our tendency to stick with the default option can help save resources. (S-WoPEC)
- “Rise and Shine: The Daily Routines of History’s Most Creative Minds” (The Guardian)
- “Spectacular Time-Lapse Video of 7 Starry Nights” (My Modern Metropolis)
Please note that the content of this site should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute.
Photo credit: ©iStockphoto.com/hocus-focus
