What we’re reading (8/31)
“Day Of The Unicorn Comes For Politico” (New York Sun). “As feats of publishing entrepreneurship go, it’s one for the record books, or at least the business school case studies — Politico, a Washington-centric mostly online news organization founded in 2007, will be sold to the German publisher Axel Springer for a reported $1 billion. If that sum is even close to being accurate, it’s staggering. Time magazine was sold in 2018 to Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne Benioff for $190 million. The Washington Post was sold to Jeff Bezos in 2013 for $250 million.”
“Are Value Stocks Cheap for a Fundamental Reason?” (AQR). “We have been discussing the attractiveness of the value factor for many months based on the unusually high value spread, which compares the valuation multiples of expensive stocks to cheap stocks. This metric is still extremely cheap… 90th+ percentile cheap across all regions…the current high value spread is forecasting high expected returns, not lower than usual fundamental growth rates for cheap versus expensive stocks.”
“Hotel Stocks Are Improving, but Risks Persist” (Wall Street Journal). “Hotel REITs are among the riskier real-estate bets because rooms turn over every day and travel is particularly vulnerable to economic swings. They were among the hardest hit when the pandemic began. New data suggest things are getting better. In the second quarter, hotel REITs’ cumulative funds from operations—an earnings metric widely used in commercial real estate—turned positive for the first time since early last year, according to the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts.”
“Robinhood Tanks After SEC Chair Tells Barron’s That Banning Payment For Order Flow Is A Possibility” (CNBC). “Shares of Robinhood dropped Monday amid several bouts of bad news for the brokerage app. Robinhood’s stock fell 6.9% to $43.64 per share after Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler told Barron’s that banning the controversial practice of payment for order flow is ‘on the table.’ Gensler told the outlet that payment for order flow — the back-end payment brokerages receive for directing clients’ trades to market makers — has ‘an inherent conflict of interest.’”
“Why Do We work Too Much?” (The New Yorker). “In the modern office, stress has become a default metric for judging whether we are busy enough…[a]s the anthropologist James Suzman elaborates in his recent book, “Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time,”…‘[e]ver since some of our ancestors substituted their bows and digging sticks for plows and hoes, death by overwork has been a thing…[but what drives ‘death by overwork’ today is employees’] own ambitions refracted through the expectations of their employers.’”
