The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• A Cycle of Misery: The Business of Building Commercial Aircraft: Making commercial aircraft (large jetliners purchased by commercial airlines) is in some ways like any other manufacturing industry. A company develops a product and tries to sell it for enough to cover the costs of developing and producing it. If it’s successful and turns a profit, it goes on to develop new products; if not, it goes out of business. What sets the aircraft industry apart is the scale at which these things take place. (Construction Physics)
• A quant winter’s tale: Across the multifactorquantiverse with AQR. Clifford Asness’s office is an odd mix of finance old-timer and teenage bedroom. Books about Churchill stand alongside DC Comics encyclopaedias, the sea of family photos is dotted with islands of vintage Marvel memorabilia, and next to his computer a jar of Pepcid sits next to a jumbo bottle of sriracha. (Financial Times)
• The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers? Google, Amazon, Microsoft and a raft of others fired thousands of workers in January, continuing a layoff wave that began in 2022. (Washington Post)
• Facebook at 20: Four ways the app changed the world: The world’s most popular social network has been redesigned dozens of times. But its aim has remained the same: to connect people online. And make mountains of money from advertising. As the platform turns 20, here are four ways Facebook has changed the world. (BBC)
• Why NYC Apartment Buildings Are on Sale Now for 50% Off: Tougher rent control, returning worldwide, destroys $75 billion in property value. Cash-strapped tenants cheer as they maintain a foothold in the city. (Bloomberg)
• Precipice of fear: the freerider who took skiing to its limits: Jérémie Heitz has pushed freeriding to breathtaking, beautiful new extremes. But as the risks get bigger, the questions do, too. (The Guardian)
• Everybody Hates Cocomelon: An epidemic with a stranglehold on toddlers? Or overblown pandemonium over exceptionally insufferable content? (Off-Topic)
• The growing link between microbes, mood and mental health: New research suggests that to maintain a healthy brain, we should tend our gut microbiome. The best way to do that right now is not through pills and supplements, but better food. (Knowable)
• No, Aliens Haven’t Visited the Earth: Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise? (New York Magazine)
• The 49ers Defy Modern Football. It’s Why They’re in the Super Bowl. The San Francisco 49ers have reached the Super Bowl thanks to a strategic twist that’s changing the NFL. (Wall Street Journal)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with David Einhorn, Greenlight Capital, a value-oriented hedge fund founded in January 1996. Since its inception, Greenlight has outperformed the S&P 500 by more than 300 basis points annually. He famously shorted Allied Capital and Lehman before its bankruptcy and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.
Mutual Fund Flows Usually Lag Market Action
Source: Andrew Slimmon Morgan Stanley
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