At the risk of jinxing 2018, I am really excited.
Anything seems possible if you are in the creative/content business (as long as you do not want to get rich off it).
If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, the mentoring at your fingertips is astounding.
If you are an investor or trader…you have the rigged and regulated stock market or the wild west of crypto.
I have a ton of ideas and content in my head, but for some reason all I feel like doing today is sharing some great content that I have consumed the last few days.
To begin, I am in Netflix beast mode. The two trips to Israel allowed me to consume a ton of shows. Ellen and I have been binge watched Godless, Peaky Blinders, The Crown, and comedians Russell Howard (insane energy) and Todd Barry. All worth the time.
This comeback story being staged by Chinese phone maker Xiomi is a great read.
This podcast with Chris Dixon on the future of tech is a MUST listen. Chris has been ahead of the curve too often to ignore the freebie. All the Investor Field Guide podcasts are worth a listen.
This ‘Year of Stocktwits ‘ is a fantastic review of how smart crowds can be when it comes to investing and the importance of community and networks.
Dan Ramsden who runs strategy for Stocktwits had this great piece out on ‘Interpreting The Networks‘. Read it once a month. The conclusion (does not change the fact that you will enjoy the meat of the piece):
Tipping points and freedom
As any analysis written around this time must eventually arrive at Bitcoin, one way to read all of the foregoing is as a setting of the stage, a preface to the worldwide explosion in cryptocurrency.
If these are to be seen as a financial asset class in the traditional sense, then the value spike of the recent past resembles a bubble. If these, however, are more correctly interpreted as distributed digital networks that happen to be linked to trading mechanisms, then what shows as a bubble to the price chart reader may actually be a network tipping point.
Money and markets are themselves big network systems. They’ve been here a long time and grown even with repeated changes and disturbance. They want to be inclusive and widely accessible. Like all networks, in the last analysis, the markets want to be free.
Finally – big technology and healthcare is game on Garth! You will enjoy this read, even if it seems too early to get excited.
On the dark side, the trolls have had a great year. This New York Times piece about digital nazi’s beating a digital nazi hunter is absurd and sad.
I have to believe that 2017 was peak troll. Twitter can’t continue to be so clueless. Facebook sadly can and will, but that deal with the devil is more complicated for all of us.