This is one of the coolest business / finance tools I’ve seen in a while.
Bloomberg Industry Leaderboard
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Ben Franklin’s Daily Routine
A guide to an examined and productive day.
A Costly Quest Indeed
Normally articles about big oil spending tons of money wouldn’t surprise me but this stat jumped off the page:
WSJ: Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Royal Dutch Shell spent more than $120 billion in 2013 to boost their oil and gas output—about the same cost in today’s dollars as putting a man on the moon. (emphasis mine)
Woah.
Some Like It Hot
According to Quartz the market for hot sauce is hot. Quartz cites a number of contributing factors including America’s rising Asian & Latino populations (groups that traditionally enjoy spicy food) and the huge popularity of hot wings.
Kind of surprised to see mayonnaise coming in second.
Source: Quartz
Value of Countries’ Listed Firms
Really cool map from The Economist. The map below matches the value of entire countries’ listed firms to individual western companies.
Neil deGrasse Tyson on Living Forever
“Here’s a tricky one that I worry about. Everybody wants to live longer and I don’t know what that means, to live longer. Suppose you could live 10,000 years. Then, what’s your urge to get out of bed the next morning. There’s no time pressure on you to achieve, to accomplish, to love. When you give flowers to a loved one on a special occasion, are they made of plastic so they live forever? No, they are made of flower petals. There’s a pistil, there’s a stamen, there’s a stalk, and that will all die. And it’s the fact that it dies that empowers our emotions to appreciate it that much more. So, the finiteness of life forces me to appreciate every sunrise that I wake up every day. And if I live forever, I don’t know that I would have those emotions or those feelings or the sense that the day awaits my energy.”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
Found via Business Insider
The Rise and Fall of Minimum Wage
I don’t really have a strong view about minimum wage – I can sympathize with both sides of the argument and frankly it’s not something I spend much time thinking about. However, I did find this chart to be pretty interesting. It clearly makes the point that minimum wage is much lower in real and relative terms than it used to be.
Source: New York Times
JPM’s Guide to the Markets – Q1 2014
A great chartbook from JPM providing a comprehensive update on major markets and the economy.
A Who’s Who of Taboo
GMO: No Silver Bullets in Investing
The latest from GMO’s James Montier, No Silver Bullets in Investing (just old snake oil in new bottles) debunks some widely held beliefs about investing and inflation protection. His findings will surprise you but his conclusion probably won’t:
“The one thing that unites everything I’ve been writing about in this paper is the golden rule of investing: no asset (or strategy) is so good that you should invest irrespective of the price paid. If when buying a house the mantra is “location, location, location,” when thinking about any investment (be it an asset or a strategy), the equivalent refrain should be “valuation, valuation, valuation.” We would argue that one of the myths perpetuated by our industry is that there are lots of ways to generate good long-run real returns, but we believe there is really only one: buying cheap assets.”
Photogenic Thoughts 