The US internet giants are in a war to corner our attention but the Chinese internet giants are closer to cornering attention AND utility.  I’m on my way back from a week in Hong Kong.  Unfortunately I was crushed by the flu for a few days and was not at my best in meetings.  I …

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What a year for Vanguard.  Vanguard is not some overnight success.  Vanguard does not pitch investors on fancy strategies and technology advantages. It wins because they cost less.  Which brings me to this great tweet I saw from  Venture Capitalist Leo Polovets: When Bogle started Vanguard he had a big vision but a simple strategy. …

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Complacency has crept back into the markets. I like to check the very small cap streams on Stocktwits (especially biotech) when I notice the chatter picks up in these stocks (we have the data).  Yesterday I saw one of our users tell another that ‘Roadkill Draws a Crowd’, meaning that having more people watching a …

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A lot of stuff is happening out there in the real world.  The financial industry is still unwinding financial leverage from 2008.  There are a lot  of ‘decoupling’ talks in the financial media and analyst world which is fancy talk for we are waiting for something interesting to happen in the markets.  In the media …

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Having a fun day two in Hong Kong. My speech went over well …here are the first two slides  I constantly tweak the presentation but one slide that resonates globally is this one using the board game risk : I have walked the streets a bit today and what’s so striking here is how old …

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Smart people don’t multitask according to Stanford researchers in this study perils of multitasking: I hate being called a sucker for irrelevancy, but I do agree that multitasking can be a trap.  Focusing and filtering are definitely keys to success and probably happiness.  I am really conscious of this in 2017. 

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I will be in Hong Kong all week at the Next Money conference. I loved Hong Kong the first time and can’t wait to speak and network. I am watching season 5 of Downton Abbey on my flight. Ellen and I have been on and off binging on the first 4 seasons the last month. …

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Ben Evans had this great post about the ‘Inevitabilty of Technology‘. I really loved how he ended it: The key thing, I think is that we have both those deterministic drivers of change and also luck, skill and brilliance. These can take you to different places. I wrote earlier this year about what you could …

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If you have not seen ‘Black Mirror’ on Netflix go watch a few episodes. It’s a modern version of ‘Twilight Zone’.  If I were to have written an episode for them on the ‘Financial Apocalypse’ we would open in a future where robots replaced all the jobs and end with the robots that managed all …

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This is the least volatile month for the Dow in history. I have no idea when volatility picks up again but the other side of this calm period will be very interesting. I really liked this Jim Chanos interview on the possible big changes in global capitalism. As Trump takes credit for the rise of …

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