What we’re reading (1/10)
“The Top Stock Funds Of 2020” (Wall Street Journal). “While the Dow climbed 7.2% in 2020 and the S&P 500 wrapped up the year with a gain of more than 16%, the average diversified U.S. stock fund rewarded investors with a 19.1% increase…[w]hile most top-performing mutual-fund managers oversaw relatively concentrated funds and could boast of being early investors in some of the pandemic’s biggest beneficiaries like Zoom or Spotify, they emphasize that their smaller-than-average portfolios are surprisingly diverse.”
“Robinhood Has Beefed Up Its Legal Firepower With These 11 Lawyers As It Eyes A Blockbuster IPO, Including SEC Veterans And A Goldman Sachs In-House Counsel” (Business Insider). “The fintech startup Robinhood has been growing like crazy amid the pandemic. The trading app's revenue from routing trades roughly doubled from the first quarter of 2020 to the second. And as its valuation skyrocketed, Robinhood has been hiring software engineers, data analysts, and product managers. And lawyers.”
“IRS Rushes To Fix Error That Sent Millions Of Stimulus Payments To Wrong Bank Accounts” (Washington Post). “The IRS says it is fixing an error that prevented millions of people who used tax preparers from getting the second round of $600 stimulus payments. The agency said it has direct-deposited about 100 million economic impact payments…[b]ut some taxpayers using the ‘Get My Payment’ tool on the IRS website to track their stimulus relief are seeing that the money was deposited in a bank account they don’t recognize.”
“The Other Tech Giant: Wikipedia Is 20, And Its Reputation Has Never Been Higher” (The Economist). “On January 15th Wikipedia—’the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit’—will celebrate its 20th anniversary. It will do so as the biggest and most-read reference work ever. Wikipedia hosts more than 55m articles in hundreds of languages, each written by volunteers. Its 6.2m English-language articles alone would fill some 2,800 volumes in print. Alexa Internet, a web-analysis firm, ranks Wikipedia as the 13th-most-popular site on the internet, ahead of Reddit, Netflix and Instagram.”
“He Created The Web. Now He’s Out To Remake The Digital World.” (New York Times). “Three decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee devised simple yet powerful standards for locating, linking and presenting multimedia documents online. He set them free into the world, unleashing the World Wide Web. Others became internet billionaires, while Mr. Berners-Lee became the steward of the technical norms intended to help the web flourish as an egalitarian tool of connection and information sharing. But now, Mr. Berners-Lee, 65, believes the online world has gone astray.”
