Reading
across disciplines is one of the best ways to improve our investment acumen.
Here is a summary of some of the best articles I read this week.
Coffee is good for you
It's now clear that
coffee drinkers are less likely to get cancer than people who drink other
beverages, including tea.
Just to be clear,
coffee can't repair your DNA directly, so it's in no way a cure for cancer. But
scientists now know that coffee does reduce cellular damage, including
mutations to your DNA that otherwise might lead to cancer.
Brands still matter.
Brandless shuts shop!
Today
direct-to-consumer retailer Brandless becomes the first SoftBank Vision
Fund-backed startup to close down, as it stops taking orders and halts all
business operations. Brandless had been one of SoftBank's highest-profile
companies. Launched in 2017, the online retailer had a big ambition: to sell
"better for you" essential products at lower-than-name-brand prices,
going toe-to-toe against Amazon and Walmart. But the economics were tricky from
the start. Everything it sold was $3. It was losing money from high shipping
costs and was plagued with quality problems. It had tried increasing prices to
$9 on some products, but it wasn't enough.
The real risk is what you don't
know about
The biggest economic
risk is what no one’s talking about, because if no one’s talking about no one’s
prepared for it, and if no one’s prepared for it its damage will be amplified
when it arrives. Two things happen when you’re caught off guard. One is that
you’re vulnerable, with no protection against what you hadn’t considered. The
other is that surprise shakes your beliefs in a way that leaves you paranoid
and pessimistic. Paying attention to known risks is smart. But we should
acknowledge that what can’t see, aren’t talking about, and aren’t prepared for
will likely be more consequential than all the known risks combined.
Something I wish someone
told me when I was starting off
For more than three
decades, I’ve spent my days perusing the business pages, reading finance books,
scanning academic studies and talking to countless folks about their finances.
Yet, despite this intense financial education, it took me a decade or more to
learn many of life’s most important money lessons and, indeed, some key
insights have only come to me in recent years. Here are 10 things I wish I’d
been told in my 20s—or told more loudly, so I actually listened.
You think you are listening,
but you are not!
The closer we feel
toward someone, the less likely we are to listen carefully to them. It’s called
the closeness-communication bias and, over time, it can strain, and even end,
relationships.
Once you know people
well enough to feel close, there’s an unconscious tendency to tune them out
because you think you already know what they are going to say. It’s kind of
like when you’ve travelled a certain route several times and no longer notice
signposts and scenery.
But people are
always changing. The sum of daily interactions and activities continually
shapes us, so none of us is the same as we were last month, last week or even
yesterday. It turns out the best way for us to really understand those closest
to us is to spend time with them, put down our phones and actually listen to
what they have to say.
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