My morning train reads:
• Why Most Portfolios Are Under Diversified: QuantPedia’s data-driven case that even portfolios that look diversified aren’t — correlation spikes during stress, factor overlap, and the illusion of spreading risk. (QuantPedia)
• How to Find the Bargains in the Software Stock Wreckage: AI is eating away at software’s superpower: profit-rich recurring revenue. The good news? Companies—and investors—are starting to adapt. (Barron’s) but see also Big Food Is Running Out of Moves With Shoppers and Investors: Shrinkflation exhausted. Price hikes maxed out. Volume declining. The major food companies have no good options left. Investors are rightly giving up on companies like General Mills and Kraft Heinz, which are squeezed by everything from inflation to GLP-1s. (Wall Street Journal)
• The Rise and Fall of TikTok’s Real Estate Gurus: They promised passive income and generational wealth through house-flipping. Most of their followers lost money. From viral fame to class-action lawsuits. (Curbed)
• Nuclear energy could be in for a big decade: The global fleet of nuclear power plants is poised to expand quickly as climate. (Canary Media)
• The Strange Inner Life of Self-Driving Cars: What Waymo’s vehicles “see” and “think” — the hallucinations, the edge cases, the weird decisions. The AI behind the wheel is both more capable and more alien than you’d expect. (Wired)
• Boomers Were Supposed to Downsize. They Are Buying Bigger Homes Instead. Wealthy, older Americans are ripping up the traditional script for aging (Wall Street Journal) see also Miami Is Losing Its Claim to a Cheaper Cost of Living Than NYC: The migration premium has evaporated. Miami’s metro area is now more expensive than New York’s — and the people who moved south for affordability are finding out the hard way. (Bloomberg)
• Better Than Free: When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we purchase when we pay for something that could otherwise be. Kevin Kelly’s classic essay, freshly relevant — when copies are free, value migrates to things that can’t be copied: immediacy, personalization, authenticity, findability, embodiment, patronage, interpretation, and accessibility. (Kevin Kelly)
• Why Am I Left-Handed? I enjoy being left-handed. It grants entry into a smug little club, whose members — 10% of the human population — carry the secret knowledge that we are overrepresented among U.S. presidents, famous artists and musicians, and top athletes. An invisible difference in 10% of humans poses deep mysteries in several fields at once. An invisible difference in 10% of humans poses deep mysteries in several fields at once. (Quanta Magazine)
• Trump’s New Election Conspiracy Isn’t About 2020. It’s About November. “What is important is understanding what he’s trying to do: He’s searching for a way to legitimize interference in an election he knows his party is going to lose in November.” (Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance)
• 29 Reasons We Loved the 2026 World Cup: The Ringer’s comprehensive love letter to the tournament — the goals, the upsets, the memes, and the cultural shift that happened while nobody was paying attention to baseball. Verde’s last stand to the prophetic photo of Messi and Lamine Yamal, this summer’s World Cup delivered on and off the pitch (The Ringer) see also Top 30: from half a million World Cup photos, why I love these the most: Our picture editor chooses his favourite images from the tournament including Lionel Messi’s cathedral, that delicious diving header from Jude Bellingham and a humbling scene in Gaza. The Guardian’s photo editor picked 30 from 500,000. The results are extraordinary — the sport, the fans, the moments between the moments. (The Guardian)
Video of the day: How the Iran War Is Rewiring the Oil Market
Be sure to check out the latest Masters in Business with Jason Wenk, founder and CEO of Altruist, a modern custodian built as a clean sheet from the ground up, fully integrated with artificial intelligence. He began his career at Morgan Stanley before launching Retirement Wealth Advisors, and then FormulaFolios. The through-line of his career has been creating lower-cost, tech-enabled, financial advice.
Nuclear energy could be in for a big decade
Source: Canary Media
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.