At the supermarket, why do we all get the sense that we made the wrong decision in choosing a slow checkout line? Turns out that’s actually true most of the time, and until they change the organization method you can mathematically expect this frustrating experience to repeat itself more often […]
Outlook
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Assange gave an interview to 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft, which aired last night. Banking executives couldn’t have been pleased to hear this part:
Washington State’s O Bee Credit Union is running a local scavenger hunt based on Microsoft’s Tags (QR Codes) and will give away $15,000 in cash prizes to some who successfully capture all 30 tags on their mobile phones.
One important driver of what we’re seeing, via Global Macro Monitor: Egypt’s a nation with sustained 9+% unemployment, and around 40% of Egypt’s population of just under 80 million live on the income equivalent of roughly $2 per day (AFP). Meanwhile, food inflation in Egypt is running at about 17% […]
In this remarkable Q&A with Francis Ford Coppola, the esteemed filmmaker suggests another approach to making a living in the field: We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. […]
In Davos, questioning the wine and the art – Felix Salmon and Dan Arieli World market valuation heat map – Seeking Delta Big mac inflation versus official inflation rates – The Economist’s Daily Chart Super Bowl Indicator: The Secret History – Jason Zweig, WSJ John Paulson racks up a second […]
The Fed, translated into plain English – Slate and Planet Money Want to make money in the stock market? Own it only when it’s closed – Tradestreaming and BIG The relationship between speed cameras and road deaths – The Economist [chart] Why people happily pay $71,000+ to go to Davos […]
Here’s the problem with starting an exercise regimen: You typically pay big up front for the gym membership or equipment, then try to motivate yourself to use it enough to make that payment worthwhile. But recouping a sunk cost isn’t much of a motivator, so you end up both out […]
In 1936, economist John Maynard Keynes likened investor behavior in the stock market to a beauty contest gone awry: It is not a case of choosing those [faces] that, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those that average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We […]
A new paper from the American Finance Association finds (from the abstract): An increase in SVI [Google search frequency] predicts higher stock prices in the next two weeks and an eventual price reversal within the year. It also contributes to the large first-day return and long-run underperformance of IPO stocks. […]
A common rule of thumb is that it’s better to rent a home when the cost of buying is at least 20 times higher, and it’s smarter to buy when that ratio falls to 15 or lower. Real estate search company Trulia drew upon its wealth of data to produce […]