What we’re reading (8/2)
“Families File First Wave Of Covid-19 Lawsuits Against Companies Over Worker Deaths” (Wall Street Journal). “Employers across the country are being sued by the families of workers who contend their loved ones contracted lethal cases of Covid-19 on the job, a new legal front that shows the risks of reopening workplaces.”
“Big Data Has Yet To Hit The Ball Out Of The Park” (RealClearMarkets). A fantastic primer very relevant to what we’re doing here at Stoney Point: “Are big events caused by the same forces that drive day-to-day changes? Or are they reactions to previous and distant big events? Does a sudden dramatic change in an ecosystem result from an unstable system randomly drifting to a crisis point? Or is there some longer-term evolutionary principle at work that builds punctuation into equilibrium via natural selection?”
“Why The S&P 500 May Now Be Easier To Beat And What This Means For Your Investments” (MarketWatch). Apparently, the long-run impact of being added to an index is negative as company’s subsequently make worse decisions about investment, dividends, repurchases, and financing—perhaps related to the significant presence of index funds that buy the whole index without regard to these idiosyncratic, company-specific details. One implication is that there could be an edge from avoiding the index (although worth noting that one of the authors of the actual study “balked” at this idea, noting that it is never easy to “beat the market”).
“Why Facebook’s Ad Business Is Doing Better Than Google’s During The Pandemic So Far” (CNBC). In investor notes and flash reports on Thursday and Friday, “analysts said factors like the amount of revenue coming from direct-response versus brand advertising, exposure to areas like travel and Google’s sheer size gave Facebook’s ad business a leg up over Google during the second quarter.”
“‘America, What a Country'. Michael Dell On His Life And Business” (Dell). An interview with Michael Dell. “‘While 2020 will be seen as a kind of a tragic year with economic disruption and loss of life, there’s a couple of other stories that are going on here,’ Mr. Dell said. ‘One is, it’s kind of amazing how much business and commerce and education and health care and everything else continued while all that was going on. That would not have been the case 15 or 20 years ago.’ And this is just the beginning, he said. ‘I also think that 2020 will be a year of kind of great accelerations,’ he said. ‘We’ve kind of got a glimpse of the future here.’”
