Breaking Up is Hard to Do Do many of us even remember the days when our telephonic voice choices were AT&T and nothing more? The telephone invention is like most great inventions, the early pioneers working on such a device fade by comparison to Alexander Graham Bell, who patented the device in the U.S. in 1876. History rewards the commercializers of great inventions. Just ask Thomas Alva Edison. Bell fancy-stepped his way into forming…
Desk Toys There is an advertisement on TV these days for insurance with a guy in his office, which is turned into a ball pit. Who can tell anymore if these ads are for Geico, Progressive, Farmers or whatever? Unless there is a gecko or that androgynous Flo person in the ad, they are all funny and good entertainment to watch, but all they really do is remind us that insurance is a competitive…
Pivoting In my business we have decided to try to pivot. Let me try to explain what I mean by that. Life is about flexibility and change. When a business faces a roadblock, especially an insurmountable one, the only sensible thing to do is to alter direction to get around the roadblock. By most standards, that is considered intelligent management. In a hedge fund that is called style-drift and is deadly to investors as it…
The Long and the Short of It We have all heard about the UN report that gives us a dozen years to take corrective action before the climate change battle is irretrievable lost. That report, while falling on seemingly deaf Trumpster ears, has made the EU sit up and get even more serious than they have been about addressing the root causes of things like greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Running a business called Low…
Borderlines This is not the pro-immigration rant you have all come to expect from me in this blog. By the way, I am very pro-immigration and I do seem to be ranting more lately (mostly at work and at the moon over Mr. Trump), but this piece is about different borderlines. I am haunted by great movies and there are very few that are greater than Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. I think…
There’s No Accounting for Taste Do you remember that scene from the original Ghostbusters movie when The EPA nerd lets loose the ghosts that the team has trapped and kept in a special Ecto-Containment Unit in the wall of the converted firehouse (actually located in Tribeca just off West Broadway)? The team is forced to describe to the mayor what will happen if the ghosts get out. Venkman says, “This city is headed for…
Courtesy Counts Yesterday I finished up a two-day conference in Rotterdam. It’s 7am at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and I’m sitting at a lonely Delta gate waiting for the onslaught of passengers, ticket agents and duty-free agents to descend on this place for the 9am JFK flight. There is a large African man sitting ten feet away and he has not learned the basics of cellphone courtesy. He has taken several calls with an absurdly…
Bearding the Lion Let us start with how exactly one “beards”. Does it mean growing out your whiskers? I’m guessing not since, try as you might, I doubt anyone can force any beast to grow whiskers. Does it mean to grab the beard of the beast to annoy the shit out of It? I also doubt that. Grabbing a beast’s facial hair seems both difficult to accomplish given that it’s best weapon is probably its…
An Angry Man Back in 1987, over thirty years ago, I had a young man working for me who was very well-liked by everyone. He was a Midwesterner who was smart and shrewd, but generally mild-mannered. He had been a football player at a Division II school, and while tall and lean, he was also considered by everyone to be a strong athlete. In the two years he had worked for me, I had not…
The Shit-Show Yesterday the New York Times published an article that the Bond Market is screaming one of its worst signals by going into the rare and portentous inverted position. That means long rates are lower than short rates. That means people are getting bearish about the economy and liquidity is starting to dry up. In forty-five years on Wall Street I learned many lessons, but none starker than to pay attention to…