THE ATLANTIC
How income affects the brain
We often attribute financial problems to bad life decisions: Why didn’t that person stay in college? Why didn’t they pick a more lucrative career? Why did they have so many kids? But several recent studies suggest that having less money can actually affect thinking and memory for the worse. A new study links lower socioeconomic status to detrimental brain changes.
FAST COMPANY
Email is the next great media platform
By all counts, email should already be dead. Yet, for all the animosity, email, by most measures, is not only thriving but also spawning a whole new style of publishing—one that promises to fill an important void in the modern media landscape. And a tiny Dutch company called Revue wants to make sure everyone—from large publishers all the way down to individual writers—can tap into that power.
KNOWLEDGE @WHARTON
Why creating a Business Plan is a ‘waste of time’
A finely crafted, tightly defined, highly detailed business plan seems like a perfectly rational tool for getting your entrepreneurial ideas off the ground. But Carl Schramm thinks you should burn it. He says that crafting a business plan is one of the biggest misconceptions about how to start a company on the right footing.
A WEALTH OF COMMONSENSE
The lump sum vs. Dollar Cost Averaging Decision
Investors often assume the markets are working against them. For those with a large slug of cash to put to work in the markets, the fear is they will put all of their money to work right before the market takes a dive and completely mistime things. There is no perfect time to invest but the lump sum vs. periodic investment decision is never an easy one. This piece looks at both the math and psychological forces behind putting your money to work all at once or dollar cost averaging in over time.
PRAGMATIC CAPITALISM
Why “buy low sell high” is so difficult to implement
One of the simple things we always hear about is how the key to good investing is “buying low and selling high”. I was reminded of this the other day when reading a particularly a bad take on buybacks. Companies catch a lot of flak because they tend to initiate buybacks when the market is booming and tend not to buy back shares when the market is tanking. But this makes perfect sense because cash flows are procyclical and you have excess cash flow in the good times and a lack of cash flow during bad times. So companies naturally end up buying back more shares during good times and fewer shares during bad times. This same thinking can be applied to investing in a more general sense.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY
How Bitcoin's boom created this obstacle for marijuana companies going public
The corporate-gymnastics maneuver known as the reverse takeover has become the marijuana industry's preferred path to going public in Canada. That deal, in which a private company absorbs most of a public one, gives smaller Canadian producers access to capital. For U.S. businesses, it offers an avenue to a fully legal market.
