10 Tuesday AM Reads

My Two-for-Tuesday morning train WFH reads: • Why Are Investors Holding More Cash? The 2020s (so far) are the worst decade ever for bond investors; Many investors decided to own cash in lieu of bonds for fixed income exposure after a rising rate, higher inflation environment crushed high quality bonds. And, Cash finally has yield. Ben Carlson on the pull of a paying money-market account and what it signals about risk appetite. Sensible as always — and a familiar name around here. (A Wealth of Common Sense) • Forget Work. Passive Income Is the New American Dream. Driven by a growing feeling that 9-to-5 jobs are a dead end, people are turning to social media to test out eccentric moneymaking schemes—along with a fair share of scams. The fantasy of earning while you sleep goes mainstream. A knowing look at a dream that usually turns out to be a second job in disguise. (Wall Street Journal) see also These Are the Best Income Investments Now. Where to Find Yields of 5% or More. Dividend stocks looks like the best bets, but some types of bonds are also looking up. With cash still paying, Barron’s maps where the real income lives. A practical survey for anyone tired of clipping money-market coupons. (Barron’s) • With Mega-IPOs, Index Concentration Can Encourage Shift Toward Active Management: As indexes are increasingly dominated by large companies, managers tout active strategies as a solution. Top-heavy Indexes make the case for active stock-picking. Inside-baseball for the asset-allocation crowd. (Chief Investment Officer) • China Has Matched Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Resetting AI Race: Clampdown on top U.S. artificial intelligence is fueling concern that Washington is handing Beijing a cyberwarfare advantage. The WSJ reports Chinese labs closing the gap on AI-driven cyber capabilities. Read it as one data point in a fast-moving, hard-to-verify race. (Wall Street Journal) see also China Defies US Restrictions and Builds the World’s Fastest Supercomputer: The Chinese supercomputer LineShine was ranked as the fastest in the world, despite not using any GPUs. Export controls meet workaround. A reminder that constraints often accelerate the thing they’re meant to slow. (Wired) • When to Fire Yourself as a DIY Investor: A great advisor acts much like a good doctor. They shouldn’t just hand you an off-the-shelf product the minute you walk in. They need a systematic, diagnostic process to get to the root cause of what your life actually requires. A great advisor isn’t a stock-picker. They are a disciplined thinking partner whose job is to pull you out of the weeds of your spreadsheets and bring you to the “balcony of your life.” On perspective, mortality, and knowing when to hand the portfolio to someone else. Grumet writes about money the way a hospice doctor would — which he is. (The Purpose Code) • He Dared to Buy Senior Housing at Its Lows. Now He Runs a $160 Billion Empire. Welltower’s CEO received an enormous pay package for the company’s turnaround, which has drawn shareholder backlash The contrarian real-estate bet paid off enormously. The buy-when-others-flee playbook, in profile form. (Wall Street Journal) • Is the vibecession real — or is the survey broken? A shift to online polling and undersampling of Republicans are skewing America’s most-cited measure of consumer sentiment. But there’s one big problem with the discussion: most of the participants are relying on a broken survey, the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey (“Index of Consumer Sentiment” or “ICS”), that is in dire need of being repaired. Failure to correct for these issues has led to plenty of pet theories — but they explain a trend that may not even exist. Nate Silver pokes at the methodology behind the gloom. A useful skeptic’s read alongside the sentiment pieces above. (Silver Bulletin) see also Is Partisanship Driving Consumer Sentiment? 1. The past ~20 years have seen a much greater spillover from partisan beliefs into sentiment; This is especially vivid around changes in White House party control; Members of both major parties do this, but it is more intense among those who identify as “right-leaning;” And the 2022 companion: how your team affiliation colors how you feel about the economy. Still the most underrated variable in the surveys. (The Big Picture) see also What Else Might be Driving Sentiment? Pulling this one from my own archives — a 2023 take on the sentiment puzzle that holds up amid this week’s vibecession debate. (The Big Picture) • How to Land a Celebrity Profile: The pressure to accommodate a famous person in exchange for access can encourage compromise. But stars don’t hold nuclear codes. CJR pulls back the curtain on the publicist-wrangling, access-trading craft behind the glossy interview. Less glamorous than the byline suggests. (Columbia Journalism Review) • The Best Magazine Articles About Fashion Ever Written (According to Me, Isabel Slone). Beginning with Joseph Mitchell’s stories of downtrodden, dirty New Yorkers all the way through to stuff published within the last ten years. I have strong opinions when it comes to the best decades for magazine journalism—the ‘90s by far—and I can spend hours trawling through ancient stories on Vanity Fair’s website, with one leading into the next. I could probably spend the rest of my life in a single room filled with back issues of Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, The New Yorker, and New York magazine and be happy for the rest of my life. A useful annotated list for the next time you want a long-read that’s not about politics. Save it. (Freak Palace) • Why the Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers: Three thousand years on, Homer still breaks Hollywood. A smart look at why the epic resists the screen — with Nolan now taking his swing. Full of violence, desire, monsters, and magic, Homer’s epic has tempted directors for decades. Can Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation survive the voyage? (New Yorker) Video of the day: The 3-part habit loop your brain is running 40 percent of the time Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this past weekend with Carl Richards, a financial advisor who is also the creator of the Sketch Guy column, which ran weekly in New York Times for a decade. He hosts Behavior Gap Radio (1,300+ episodes) He co-hosts “Kitces & Carl — Real Talk for Real Financial Advisors” with Michael Kitces.” Richards latest book is Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in 101 Simple Sketches.” New Home Sales Decrease to 580,000 Annual Rate in May Source: Calculated Risk Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.