Don’t study finance if you’re the sort of person who detests boredom. Some of the topics are absolutely dreadful, not to mention the teachers. They’ll make you do things like manually calculate the variance of a portfolio, something that sounds about as fun as it looks. If you’re a glutton for punishment, do a Master’s […]
Just prior to the dot bomb era, evidence was emerging that customer service functions were being offshored. What started with John in Mumbai ended up with Rosie in Manila. Cheaper office space and labor, a greater propensity to please, and a greater degree of “accent neutralization” were all factors in the migration of customer call […]
If you like buying special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) at $10 a share, you’ll love buying them at $6.67 a share. A Sober Look at SPACs was a study last year by Stanford and NYU that revealed “by the time the median SPAC merges with a target, it holds just $6.67 in cash for each […]
“Robots are stealing our jobs,” you’ll hear people say. This blanket statement fails to capture the nuances of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). If you take a shower after work, you’re probably going to be just fine. The two industries with the least amount of digitization right now are construction and agriculture. Ironically, both industries […]
After Edward Snowden leaked that the National Security Agency (NSA) used backdoor channels to gain access to smartphones, webcams, and traffic cameras, people have become paranoid that the government is watching through our devices. The rise of sticky notes and cover slides attached to webcams is a testament to that fact. (Never mind the hackers […]
No matter how hard we try to follow best practices – diversify, don’t try to time the markets, use dollar cost averaging – we always find ourselves reverting back to bad habits. Of the 32 positions we’re holding right now, two of them we engaged in a bit of market timing on – Alteryx (AYX) […]
Drug development is complicated business. Medicinal chemists, many who have spent nearly a decade training in the halls of academia, are tasked with painstakingly synthesizing each and every molecule that could potentially have a therapeutic effect. These compounds need to then be screened in cells just to make sure they’re not just straight-up toxic, with […]
A reader recently dropped by to say that our content would get us on Howard Stern before it landed us a Ted talk. It’s compliments like that which keep us going and let us know our snark is set to an appropriate level. Sometimes saying things how they are is seen as being iconoclastic, and […]
While “Retail Apocalypse” would no doubt make a great sequel to the iconic movie “Apocalypse Now” – with Martin Sheen reprising his role as Capt. Willard, trying to navigate his way through the dangerous modern day Mekong of the American mall – the term actually refers to the collapse of brick-and-mortar stores. More than 100 […]
The way venture capitalists (VCs) look at business ventures depends on which stage they’re coming in at. American television show Shark Tank gives us a glimpse of what VCs look for in the earliest stages of a business – signs of traction, which usually comes in the form of revenues. “We did $700,000 in sales […]