What we’re reading (9/18)
“Female-Managed US Funds Outperform All-Male Rivals” (Financial Times). “All-women and mixed-gender US fund teams outperformed all-male portfolio management teams so far this year, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis that raises fresh questions about the investment industry’s progress in addressing its gender diversity problems…[s]o far this year, female managed funds on average delivered returns of -57 basis points compared with their benchmarks. All male run funds performed worse, with average returns of -164bp.”
“America’s Offices Sit Half-Empty Six Months Into The Covid-19 Pandemic” (Wall Street Journal). Data from Brivo, a company that provides access-control systems for workplaces, shows that “unlocks” at offices—when someone uses their credentials to enter an office—in late August were down 51% from the end of February. By comparison, visits to manufacturing and warehouse locations, where fewer jobs can be done remotely, remained down by a third.
“The Market Isn’t Convinced The Federal Reserve Can Achieve Its Inflation Objective” (CNBC). The Fed has an explicit inflation target of about 2 percent a year. But that target is an average that applies to a basket of goods. Ideally, that average isn’t achieved by way of financial asset prices rising a lot with wages being flat. “For the past decade or so, the Federal Reserve has been quite effective in helping to create inflation, just not the kind that it normally targets. The Fed’s perpetually easy monetary policy, consisting of historically low short-term interest rates and trillions of dollars in bond buying, has coincided with a huge swell in asset prices, stocks in particular. What it has not driven is the kind of inflation central bank officials like to see – higher wage pressures, for instance, that help improve the standard of living as well as signal a vibrant economy not caught in the slow-growth trend that has persisted since the financial crisis.”
“Our Ultimate Stock Pickers’ Top 10 Dividend-Yielding Stocks” (Morningstar). You’ll find most of Stoney Point’s picks don’t even pay dividends, much less big dividends, but, for what it’s worth, “Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) has spoken highly of companies that return capital to shareholders and is not against investing in and holding higher-yielding names.”
“The Wayback Machine And Cloudfare Want To Backstop The Web” (Wired). “The web is decentralized and fluid by design, but all that chaos and ephemerality can make it difficult to keep a site up and online without interruption. That's what has made the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine feature so invaluable over the years, maintaining a history of long-forgotten pages. Now its deep memory will help make sure the sites you visit never go down, through a partnership with the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.”
