Thought this was worth sharing.
Now if I could just find the time to put this stuff into practice.
Ideas
May 12, 2013
May 01, 2013
April 27, 2013
Here Are Some Links for Your Weekend Reading
Whether it is time to lose weight or gain some new skill or capability ... stop telling yourself you will 'try'. Here are your options (according to Yoda).
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.
- The Future According to Google's Larry Page. (Fortune Tech)
- Questions Loom as Robot Technology Advances. The implications of the robot revolution. (MIT)
- Even the Twitter Elite Say It's OK to Hate Twitter Now. (The Atlantic)
- Is Organic Better? Ask a Fruit Fly. (NYTimes)
- Have We Evolved to Be Nasty or Nice? (Wall Street Journal)
- Bloomberg Jumps on ‘Twitter A-List’ After SEC’s Social Media Decision. (AdvisorOne)
- Gold’s fair value is $800 an ounce. Is its bear market just beginning? (Mark Hulbert)
- What Five Real Economists Think about Bitcoin’s Future. (TechCrunch)
- The 10 Highest Paid Hedge Fund Managers in 2012. (BusinessInsider)
- Top Fund Managers Took Home Less Last Year. While the average hedge fund made a 6.4 per cent profit for its investors in 2012. (FT)
April 21, 2013
The Most Honest Three Minutes In Television History? [Video]
Tragedies often sound a clarion call that get people to band together and be their best selves.
But how long will the good behavior last? Like exercise or showers, while it is good to do ... it is better to repeat.
It is time to take an honest look at ourselves ... and take appropriate action.
The 3 minute video below highlights some tough issues. The hard truth is that progress starts with honesty.
Do you think this painted an accurate picture of the current United States?
April 20, 2013
Here Are Some Links for Your Weekend Reading
It was cool that they found the bombers so fast. Yet, I have mixed feelings about what that implies about the 'surveillance society' we live in.
Sometimes things just don't seem to make sense ... other times they do.
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.
- Google Person Finder Located the Missing at Boston Marathon Explosion. (Mashable)
- Stupidity: Why Didn't Evolution Make Us All Geniuses? Why we still do dumb things. (NS)
- IBM CEO Predicts Three Ways Technology Will Transform the Future of Business. (Forbes)
- Disruption Results from Rational Responses to a Changing Environment. (Harvard BR)
- Stanley Kubrick Worried that IBM Would Get Mad About His Psycho Computer, HAL. (BI)
- After Apple’s Rise, a Bruising Fall. Wall St. has turned viciously on its one-time iDarling. (NYT)
- The Death of the PC Has Not Been Exaggerated. (Forbes)
- Computer Sales in Free Fall. Quarterly Shipments Dropped 14% (Wall Street Journal)
- New Study: Smaller Hedge Fund Managers Outperform. (AllAboutAlpha)
- Condoleezza Rice: Russia Is Really Just a Large Oil & Gas Syndicate. (AdvisorOne)
April 13, 2013
Here Are Some Links for Your Weekend Reading
Some things are harder than others ...
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.
- Clayton Christensen Wants to Transform Capitalism. Interesting insights. (Wired)
- Why Weirdos Outperform Normals. (Linkedin)
- Your Brain Is Hooked on Being Right. (Harvard Business Review)
- Spotify’s Top 10 most viral tracks. Or, proof I'm getting older and more like my father. (Salon)
- Online Passwords. At the height of the cold war, the "secret unlocking code" for America's nuclear missiles was 00000000. (Guardian)
- Dear SEC, This Is HFT "Cheating" At Its Most Obvious. Regards, Everyone Else. (ZeroHedge)
- Computer Algorithms Rely Increasingly on Human Helpers. (NYTimes)
- FBI Joins SEC in Computer Trading Probe. (FT)
- Top 10 Richest Colleges for 2012—The Biggest Endowments. (AdvisorOne)
- David Stockman On ‘The Great Deformation’ and Our Economic Doom. Are these new stock-market records just another bubble? (TDB)
April 09, 2013
Some Men Can Multitask - Solving a Rubik's Cube While Juggling
I tried to tell my wife that multitasking was a myth (so she shouldn't expect me to be able to do it).
Sure someone could learn to juggle, or even to solve a Rubik's Cube ... but to do both at the same time?
Watch the video.
via YouTube.
Supposedly, the same guy can solve a Rubik’s Cube in under 8 seconds, making him the 48th fastest cube solver on the planet.
I still can't talk and type ...
March 31, 2013
Some Things to Ponder After the First Quarter
Urgent, please read ASAP.
That's what gets done, of course. The urgent.
Not the article you haven't gotten around to writing, the trip to the gym that will pay off in the long run, the planning for your upcoming birthday party, dinner with your parents (who would love to see you), ten minutes to sit quietly, saying thank you to a friend for no real reason... no, we do the urgent first.
The problem, of course, is that the queue of urgent never ends, it merely changes its volume as it gets longer.
Yes, we've heard it said that it's the important, not the urgent, that deserves attention. But it understates just how much we've been manipulated by those that would make their important into our urgent.
via Seth Godin.
We just finished the first quarter of 2013.
It's been three months since New Year's Eve, and most New Year's Resolutions have been forgotten. As you prepare to face the rest of 2013, ask yourself these powerful questions from Greg Bustin:
- What do I want?
- What’s holding me back?
- What’s the impact of not getting what I say I want?
Now get going. It's not just the first day of a new Quarter ... it's the first day of the rest of your life.
March 24, 2013
Here Are Some Links for Your Weekend Reading
What bothers you most about someone else is often a clue about what you don't like about your own circumstances ... or, a political cartoonist could point it out instead.
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.
- 10 Billionaire Biographies You Must Read. (Under30CEO)
- Lessons for Data Driven Businesses. (TechCrunch)
- The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food. (NYTimes)
- Desmond Tutu and The Dalai Lama's Extraordinary Talk On God and Religion. (HuffingtonPost)
- An Ingenious Way Of Using Google Maps To Tell Where Rich And Poor People Live. (BizInsider)
- Forbes Lists the World's Richest People. The Billionaire List. (Forbes)
- Singapore: The World's Richest City. (WSJ Video)
- Google Passes Apple as Top U.S. Mutual and Hedge Fund Holding. (AppleInsider)
- Yardeni: S&P 500 Could Hit 1665 Mid-Year. (BusinessInsider)
- Sign of the Times: Celebrity Mila Kunis Talked Stocks on CNBC. Is that as an ominous sign for the rally, or just an indication that “dumb-money” is back in the game? (TDB)
March 18, 2013
The Countdown of Life - How What You Do Adds Up Over Time
Are you happy how you spend your day?
Do you ever think about how most people choose to spend their time?
As you might guess, average Americans spend 8 hours at work, maybe half an hour in traffic, a few hours watching TV in the evening.
But what if you looked at it another way - what if you added up all those hours over the course of your whole life? The following infographic shows the tally.
That half an hour in traffic adds up to over a year of your life. And those innocent hours of TV? They add up to 9 years for the average American.
"It's not the years in your life that count ... It's the life in your years." ~ Abraham Lincoln
Are you giving time to the things you really care about?
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- Wow, This Dude Can Dance ... Or whatever you call what he's doing
- Out with the Old ... In with the New. This Is What Creative Destruction Looks Like.
- Here Are Some Links for Your Weekend Reading
- Short and Funny TEDTalk called "10 Top Time-Saving Tech Tips" - Bet You Don't Know All of Them
- SNL Parody of Early Google Glass Use
- Are the New Market Highs the Start of Something Bigger?
Out with the Old ... In with the New. This Is What Creative Destruction Looks Like.
The chart below shows how an industry leader got replaced by an upstart.
No surprise here; you have seen it happen before.
Given enough time, the victor of many battles is still likely to lose the war. Positions of strength (which were won through hard work and much strategy) are often wiped away in what seems like an instant.
Successful companies are not immune to competition or entropy. As proof, the capitalist landscape is littered with the corpses of established products toppled by newer, cheaper products that (over time) got better and became a serious threat.
What Causes An Established Leader to Falter?
A closer inspection might suggest a deeper truth. Perhaps this marketplace shift happens when the established player places too great an emphasis on satisfying their customers' current needs (for example, myopically focusing on what got them here, rather than 'skating to where the puck will be ...").
In other words, companies are lulled into a false sense of security (by their progress, talent, infrastructure, etc.) and fail to adapt or adopt new technology that will meet customers' unstated or future needs. Consequently, such companies eventually fall behind.
The Chart Above Shows Only One of the 'Ripples'.
The chart in this post shows AOL (which was the first mass entry point to the Internet and e-mail) and how 'Broadband' was captured by someone else (Netflix). But it didn't just happen here. What about Blockbuster? Don't you think their executives saw Netflix coming? Still, somehow, a smart group of people chose to stick with their 'bricks and mortar' business model ... and lost billions in shareholder value.
This creative destruction is a tectonic force in our marketplace. There have been books written on it (like Clayton Christiansen's the "Innovator's Dilemma"), and yet it's often surprising what happens.
Huge Shifts Are Happening All Around You.
When the Internet first gained popularity, who suspected a whole generation of Americans would 'cut-the-cord' and still be able to watch TV and movies on portable devices? Neither of my sons owns a TV. Many in that generation don't subscribe to cable at their house. Why? Because they take for granted that they are able to stream the content they want to the device of their choice.
That means someone is winning and someone is losing.
The 'Old Way' Is Constantly Fading Away.
Sometimes I buy fitness supplements from a small nutrition shop next to the gym I attend. It would be cheaper and easier to buy it online; but, I want to support a local merchant (and have someone to talk to if I have questions). But how long will that last? I certainly don't buy computers at a computer store (or books at a book store).
Likewise, when I first started trading, I talked to my broker often. It was comforting to know that I wasn't alone in the dark. But when was the last time you called a broker truly expecting a tradable insight or a real edge?
Electronic trading is driving prices down, and I don't see how traditional financial service institutions can avoid the creative destruction of their old business models. I'm not just talking about how they interface with customers, even how they trade and manage risk has to change.
That doesn't mean that a new business model won't arise. Of course it will. The point is just because something's been done a certain way for decades, doesn't imply it's right. In fact, it is a neon sign pointing to a strategic danger or opportunity (depending on your perspective).
It is often by standing on the shoulders of the past that we are able to gaze into the future.
A change is coming.
Posted by Howard Getson at 06:27 PM in Business, Current Affairs, Ideas, Market Commentary, Trading, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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