What we’re reading (3/5)
“Target Aims For Turnaround After First Sales Decline Since 2016” (Wall Street Journal). “The Minneapolis retailer said Tuesday it would open more than 300 new stores and invest in the majority of its locations over the next decade. It also announced a paid membership program, Target Circle 360, that offers free same-day delivery on orders over $35 and free two-day shipping. ‘Our goal is to recapture profitable sales, traffic and market share gains by expanding what makes Target different and better for our guests,’ Chief Executive Brian Cornell told analysts during an investor presentation. Shares in the company rose 12% to $168.58 as it also reported stronger-than-expected profits in the holiday quarter. Target’s stock was the S&P 500’s best performer Tuesday.”
“Bitcoin Hits Record, Breaking Pandemic-Fueled 2021 Mark” (Washington Post). “Bitcoin rose to a record price of more than $69,000 Tuesday, months after federal regulators allowed the asset class to enter the mainstream via exchange-traded funds, or ETFs.”
“The ZIP Code Shift: Why Many Americans No Longer Live Where They Work” (New York Times). “Many Americans now live roughly twice as far from their offices as they did prepandemic. That’s according to a new study, set to be released this week, from economists at Stanford and Gusto, a payroll provider, using data from Gusto. The economists studied employee and employer address data from nearly 6,000 employers across the country and found that the average distance between people’s homes and workplaces rose to 27 miles in 2023 from 10 miles in 2019, more than doubling.”
“A Matter Of Strategy In Argentina” (Manuel’s Substack). “The only instance of instantaneous stabilization in Argentina's history is the introduction of the Convertibility Plan under the presidency of Carlos Menem. The Convertibility plan established a rule for the Central Bank: it could print money only when selling pesos for dollars at a perpetually fixed exchange rate (which was one-to-one). Period. Thus, there would be a dollar in reserves in the Central Bank for every peso in circulation. If the rules are followed, this system produces results similar to dollarization because it removes the discretion to create money from the Central Bank. The domestic currency increases only when dollars are brought from abroad.”
“Wisdom Of The Silicon Crowd: LLM Ensemble Prediction Capabilities Match Human Crowd Accuracy” (Schoenegger, et al.). “Human forecasting accuracy in practice relies on the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ effect, in which predictions about future events are significantly improved by aggregating across a crowd of individual forecasters. Past work on the forecasting ability of large language models (LLMs) suggests that frontier LLMs, as individual forecasters, underperform compared to the gold standard of a human crowd forecasting tournament aggregate. In Study 1, we expand this research by using an LLM ensemble approach consisting of a crowd of twelve LLMs. We compare the aggregated LLM predictions on 31 binary questions to that of a crowd of 925 human forecasters from a three-month forecasting tournament. Our main analysis shows that the LLM crowd outperforms a simple no-information benchmark and is statistically equivalent to the human crowd.”
