How VCs Spend Their Time. Err, How This VC Spends His Time. “Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”

How VCs Spend Their Time. Err, How This VC Spends His Time.

Posted on January 5, 2014 by hunterwalk

Lost time is never found again – Benjamin Franklin

“A Venture Capitalist? What exactly is that?” If you’re in the technology industry you can probably answer but as I discovered this holiday season, most of my extended family and childhood friends were a bit fuzzier on the concept. Turns out the best way to explain was to share how I spend my days at Homebrew, the seed fund Satya and I founded in 2013. Read more of this post

The Essence of Being A Quant

The Essence of Being A Quant

Posted on January 6, 2014 by david varadi

During the holidays, a person gets a chance to reflect on the more philosophical matters. In my case, one question that stood out was to define the essence and importance of the profession to investment management. I began to realize that the term itself or even the profession is poorly defined and articulated even within the industry. The first time I was asked what a “quant” was, I simply explained that they were number-crunchers that created systems for trading money. The reality is not far off from this simplistic explanation. But having read and heard a lot of different explanations (and accusations!), the essence of being a quant is to translate any possible unit of useable information for either financial forecasting, algorithm development, or rules-based systems for trading-  lets call this broad class simply “trading models“. This includes (but is definitely not limited to): 1) fundamental data 2) technical data 3) economic data 4) news 5) weather 6) or anything that might be considered useful or predictive. The analytical tools of the trade have become highly cross-disciplinary and come from a wide variety of fields such as (but not limited to): 1)math 2) statistics 3) physics 4) economics 5) linguistics 6) psychology 7)biology. A lot of the common methods used across fields fall in the now burgeoning interdisciplinary field of “data mining and analysis.” Read more of this post

Riches and risk: welcome to the world of tomorrow; Pressures for conflict in a more disordered planet are there for all to see

January 9, 2014 6:46 pm

Riches and risk: welcome to the world of tomorrow

By Philip Stephens

Pressures for conflict in a more disordered planet are there for all to see

The season of goodwill has made way for the new year torrent of predictions. Most are quickly forgotten – mercifully so, given the hit rate of the commentariat. Today’s world spins too quickly for the sharpest crystal-ball gazer. A better way of looking at what lies ahead is to chart some of the underlying forces shaping the global landscape. The outline that emerges is one of rising prosperity and opportunity, and of diminishing security.

Read more of this post

Third Avenue Chairman/Founder Martin Whitman Blasts Nobel Prize Winner’s Work Calling It ‘Utter Nonsense’ And ‘Unscholarly’

Hedge Fund Manager Blasts Nobel Prize Winner’s Work Calling It ‘Utter Nonsense’ And ‘Unscholarly’

JULIA LA ROCHE

JAN. 9, 2014, 6:25 PM 6,101 16

ValueWalk obtained a letter where Third Avenue Management’s chairman/founder Martin Whitman blasts Nobel Prize Laureate Eugene Fama.  “I am disappointed that a Nobel Prize was awarded to Eugene Fama, who studies only markets and prices; and whom, I daresay, does not focus on Form 10-Ks or the footnotes to a corporation’s audited financial statements,” Whitman said in the opening of the letter to shareholders.  Read more of this post

Turning Body Parts — Mannequin Body Parts — Into a Business

JANUARY 9, 2014, 7:00 AM

Turning Body Parts — Mannequin Body Parts — Into a Business

By COLLEEN DEBAISE

Judi Henderson-Townsend has a resolution for the new year: She wants to hit a million dollars in revenue.

It won’t be easy. For nearly 15 years, Ms. Henderson-Townsend, a resident of Oakland, Calif., has been selling, renting and recycling mannequins — a quirky line of work that she stumbled upon, quite accidentally, while looking for a garden sculpture on Craigslist in 2000. Annual revenue for her company, Mannequin Madness, has fluctuated over the years, sometimes topping $500,000 but always falling shy of $800,000. Read more of this post

If Tesco is in trouble, don’t blame the boss; Successful corporate leaders don’t always leave great legacies. Spare a thought for the boss who has to pick up the pieces

If Tesco is in trouble, don’t blame the boss

Successful corporate leaders don’t always leave great legacies. Spare a thought for the boss who has to pick up the pieces

Stefan Stern

theguardian.com, Friday 10 January 2014 09.00 GMT

Every little helps. But for Tesco, the journey back to health will be of the 1,000-mile variety, and for now single steps will get them only so far. The company’s latest results, in the UK at least, were weak. Like-for-like (based on existing stores) sales were down 2.4% in the six weeks to 5 January. “Clearly Christmas was disappointing,” its chief executive, Philip Clarke, said. Read more of this post

Why Amateurs Should Invest in Common Stocks: Buffett Explains

Why Amateurs Should Invest in Common Stocks: Buffett Explains

by DavidMerkelJanuary 9, 2014

There is a benefit to investing directly in common stocks as an individual.  I’ll let Buffett help me explain this:

“I am a better investor because I am a businessman and I am a better businessman because I am an investor.”

My own life is one of having been an amateur investor, and became a professional investor over time.  My mother is an excellent amateur investor, one whose record would put 90%+ of professionals to shame.  I know some great amateur investors, but they are not the norm.  If they were the norm, we would not have lots of financial intermediaries trolling for business. Read more of this post

Why Great CEOs Ignore Their Company’s Stock Price

Why Great CEOs Ignore Their Company’s Stock Price

By Brian Richards | More Articles | Save For Later
January 6, 2014 | Comments (19)

IN CORPORATE AMERICA, we have, to borrow a phrase from Jack Bogle, an abundance of “management,” but not enough “leadership .” Over the past year, this problem has come to a boil — and has shown that we are in desperate need of new types of leaders at the helms of our publicly listed companies. We need far fewer income statement managers and far more business-builders. Read more of this post

Teaching Your Kids to Be Rich; It’s not just developing a work ethic—these days, they need to deal with social media too

Teaching Your Kids to Be Rich

It’s not just developing a work ethic—these days, they need to deal with social media too.

LIZ MOYER

Updated Jan. 10, 2014 7:19 p.m. ET

Getting rich is hard enough. But teaching the next generation how to be rich is tricky, too. More people are confronting that issue as the booming stock market, an improving economy and the success of young companies such as Twitter TWTR -0.09% andFacebook FB +1.26% swell the ranks of the well-off. By 2015, roughly 4.4 million wealthy North Americans—those with at least $1 million in investible assets—are expected to hold a total of $15 trillion, according to consulting firm Capgemini and RBC Wealth Management, up from 3.7 million people and $12.7 trillion in 2012.

Do’s and Don’ts

Read more of this post

Michelangelo’s Sistine Sketch: A centuries-old puzzle focusing on a drawing stored in Florence appears to have been solved

Found? Michelangelo’s Sistine Sketch

KELLY CROW

Jan. 10, 2014 9:43 p.m. ET

For centuries, art historians have puzzled over the meaning of a geometric drawing that Michelangelo sketched on a sheet of paper stored in the Buonarroti Archive in his hometown of Florence. The drawing doesn’t look like much at first glance, just a sienna-brown row of inky triangles and half-moon shapes. Read more of this post

Juan Carlos: Spain’s struggling monarch; Weakened by scandal, the Bourbon king is fighting for his legacy

January 10, 2014 5:09 pm

Juan Carlos: Spain’s struggling monarch

By Tobias Buck

Weakened by scandal, the Bourbon king is fighting for his legacy, writes Tobias Buck

The King of Spain could not have wished for a better occasion, or more loyal company, to mark his return to public life on Monday. Surrounded by the gilded splendour of the throne room in Madrid’s royal palace, Juan Carlos was presiding over the traditional New Year ceremony to honour Spain’s armed forces. Read more of this post

The Mind’s Eye: Synesthesia Has Business Benefits

The Mind’s Eye: Synesthesia Has Business Benefits

By Caroline Winter January 09, 2014

Michael Haverkamp has a marketable mental condition: When he runs his fingers across the leather of a car’s steering wheel, he sees colors and shapes. “If the texture feels rough, I see a structure in my mind’s eye that has dark spots, hooks, and edges,” explains the 55-year-old German, a Ford Motor (F) engineer. “But if it’s too smooth, the structure glows and looks papery, flimsy.” Haverkamp says these hallucinations, the result of a neurological condition called synesthesia, help with his nuanced work, optimizing and coordinating the look, feel, and sound of vehicle fabrics, knobs, pedals, and more. He shares his preferences for each with designers, who then use that information to build cars that are more pleasing to drivers. Read more of this post

Weitz Funds: Keeping It in the Family; Weitz Investment Management has fewer than 10 funds, but Wally Weitz’s long-term outlook and focus on undervalued companies make them all worth a look

SATURDAY, JANUARY 11, 2014

Weitz Funds: Keeping It in the Family

By SARAH MAX | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

Weitz Investment Management has fewer than 10 funds, but Wally Weitz’s long-term outlook and focus on undervalued companies make them all worth a look.

When most boys his age were devouring Louis L’Amour Westerns or Marvel Comics, a young Wally Weitz was enthralled with a different spectacle—Wall Street. “I was the kid under the covers with a flashlight reading about stocks and bonds,” says Weitz, who at age 12 bought his first stock, General Telephone & Electronics, at $26.38 a share. When he sold three years later, the stock was up more than 60%. Read more of this post

Change Your Intention to Focus Your Attention

Change Your Intention to Focus Your Attention

by Caroline Webb  |   12:00 PM January 10, 2014

With busy schedules and to-do lists that carry us from hour to hour without much time to breathe, it’s rare that we stop to reflect on our motivations. But when we take the briefest of moments to set clear, positive intentions for what we’re doing, the payback is enormous. We can make a remarkable shift in how any assignment, conversation, or meeting feels just by considering where we want to place our attention. Read more of this post

For a More Flexible Workforce, Hire Self-Aware People

For a More Flexible Workforce, Hire Self-Aware People

by Rich Thompson  |   10:00 AM January 10, 2014

Companies frequently complain that it’s tough to find the right people. If, amidst high unemployment, this seems counterintuitive, consider the deep trends driving the mismatch: technology and globalization have transformed what it takes to succeed in business. A new generation of professionals places more importance on organizational values and passion for the work than on a paycheck. Organizations, as Cathy Benko argues in The Corporate Lattice, have replaced hierarchical structures with flatter, more collaborative work arrangements. Amidst all this fluidity, it’s difficult for managers to specify the content of jobs, and the skills and specialized knowledge required to perform them; harder still for aspiring job-winners to offer those. Read more of this post

What good is glue that doesn’t stick?

What good is glue that doesn’t stick?

Randel S. Carlock, INSEAD | Business | Sat, January 11 2014, 3:50 PM

Like many successful innovations, the Post-it Notes story began with a mistake.
In 1968, 3M chemist Spencer Silver’s attempts to develop a new, super-strong glue went awry and he found himself with a product that would stick to objects but could easily be peeled off leaving no residue or damage. Instead of tossing it aside or hiding the error, Silver shared his “revolutionary” product with colleagues.
The product was put in the “what can we do with this?” basket and four years later the company’s new products developer, Art Fry found the perfect use – as a bookmark for his church hymnal. Read more of this post

Gozilla returns: With a U.S. reboot scheduled to be released worldwide this summer, we examine the shifting views of the terrifying monster over time

Gozilla returns

BY JUN HONGO

STAFF WRITER

JAN 11, 2014

Monster on the loose: Godzilla destroyed much of Tokyo during its rampage through the capital in the original 1954 movie. | KYODO

Despite being an expert on contemporary literature as well as 20th-century Russian literary criticism, Waseda University professor Toshio Takahashi also teaches a course on the symbolism of monsters, or — more specifically — the ways in which monsters are cognitive figures that reflect the real world. Read more of this post

Have you got a head for figures? ‘Ask an American to recite a phone number, and he will usually do it in three ‘chunks’ – that is how convention presents it’

January 10, 2014 12:15 pm

Have you got a head for figures?

By Gillian Tett

‘Ask an American to recite a phone number, and he will usually do it in three ‘chunks’ – that is how convention presents it’

In recent days, I have been obsessively staring at telephone numbers. That is partly because I have just moved house and am flicking through my contacts list to send out change-of-address notes. But there is a second reason too: I have just stumbled on a fascinating little paper written by a Princeton cognitive psychologist called George Miller on the topic of “chunking”. And while this piece of research is half a century old, it has a curious relevance today – particularly in relation to those telephone numbers which are now so unthinkingly woven into the fabric of our 21st-century lives. Read more of this post

The kindness of strangers: External mentors are rare but they can offer insights not provided by internal schemes

January 8, 2014 3:37 pm

The kindness of strangers

By Elaine Moore

Jan du Plessis, chairman of Rio Tinto, keeps a statue of a bucking horse in his London office to remind him that decisions do not always go to plan.

The small bronze figure is an apt symbol for the mining industry right now. The slowdown in China’s economy has hit commodity prices and Rio Tinto has undergone big changes including significant cost cuts. Read more of this post

Culture’s Critical Role in Change Management

Culture’s Critical Role in Change Management

Posted: December 5, 2013

DeAnne Aguirre is a senior partner with Booz & Company based in San Francisco. Rutger von Post is a partner with Booz & Company based in New York and is head of the Katzenbach Center in North America. Culture’s reputation as being among the “softer” instruments of management might lead you to conclude that it’s a luxury—something that gets attention in buzz-conscious Silicon Valley but occupies more of a background position everywhere else.

Read more of this post

Inheritance should not be an alternative to hard work

January 7, 2014 7:16 pm

Inheritance should not be an alternative to hard work

By Robin Harding

In a world with more inherited riches, it makes no sense to cut estate taxes, says Robin Harding

The aspiring young law student Rastignac has his choice set out for him with brutal simplicity in Balzac’s 1835 novel Father Goriot. He can work: “There’s a nice prospect for you! Ten years of drudgery straight away.” Or he can do otherwise: “There is but one way, marry a woman who has money.” Read more of this post

Can Singapore cultivate resilience in face of change?

Can Singapore cultivate resilience in face of change?

What makes Singapore unique? That was the question posed to a group of young professionals some years ago at a community dialogue I attended.

BY LEONG CHAN-HOONG –

14 HOURS 16 MIN AGO

What makes Singapore unique? That was the question posed to a group of young professionals some years ago at a community dialogue I attended. Read more of this post

How the College Bubble Will Pop; In 1970, less than 1% of taxi drivers had college degrees. Four decades later, more than 15% do

Richard Vedder and Christopher Denhart: How the College Bubble Will Pop

In 1970, less than 1% of taxi drivers had college degrees. Four decades later, more than 15% do.

RICHARD VEDDER And CHRISTOPHER DENHART

Jan. 8, 2014 6:38 p.m. ET

The American political class has long held that higher education is vital to individual and national success. The Obama administration has dubbed college “the ticket to the middle class,” and political leaders from Education Secretary Arne Duncan to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have hailed higher education as the best way to improve economic opportunity. Parents and high-school guidance counselors tend to agree. Read more of this post

Unemployed Law Grad Found A Novel Way To Start Paying Off $100,000 In Debt; “I just smile and say there is nothing better than owning your own business.”

Unemployed Law Grad Found A Novel Way To Start Paying Off $100,000 In Debt

ERIN FUCHS

JAN. 8, 2014, 9:38 AM 28,540 47

Our stories on the plight of underemployed law grads have prompted a huge response from readers — including one who never found an attorney job but did okay for herself anyway. Read more of this post

Here’s The Fascinating Origin Of Almost Every Jewish Last Name

Here’s The Fascinating Origin Of Almost Every Jewish Last Name

BENNETT MURASKIN, SLATE
JAN. 8, 2014, 3:35 PM 146,971 44

Ashkenazic Jews were among the last Europeans to take family names. Some German-speaking Jews took last names as early as the 17th century, but the overwhelming majority of Jews lived in Eastern Europe and did not take last names until compelled to do so. The process began in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1787 and ended in Czarist Russia in 1844. Read more of this post

Economic downturns fuel sad books, claims study; Authors tend to write books containing sad words around 10 years after an economic downturn, according to a new ‘literary misery index’

Economic downturns fuel sad books, claims study

Authors tend to write books containing sad words around 10 years after an economic downturn, according to a new ‘literary misery index’

Philip Larkin, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Hardy all wrote about the bleak side of life Photo: Rex Features/Getty Images

By Telegraph reporter

10:01PM GMT 08 Jan 2014

Authors tend to write more miserable books about 10 years after an economic downturn, a study has claimed. Researchers compared the number of times certain words appeared in more than five million books to certain periods in American and British history. They found that the frequency of words expressing sadness reflected the economic conditions in the 10 years before a book was written. Read more of this post

Iceland founder Malcolm Walker, 67, says his lifelong determination to succeed has created 25,000 jobs and £600m in tax receipts

Iceland founder Malcolm Walker: ‘Why should I say sorry for my riches?’

Fame & Fortune: Iceland founder Malcolm Walker, 67, says his lifelong determination to succeed has created 25,000 jobs and £600m in tax receipts

Malcolm Walker started his first shop with a friend while they were still working for Woolworths

By Angela Wintle

6:49AM GMT 05 Jan 2014

How did your childhood experience influence your attitude to money?

I grew up in a mining village in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Dad was a colliery electrician but also ran a smallholding growing vegetables and keeping poultry. Read more of this post

John Taylor Vows Return to Currency Management After Bankruptcy of FX Concepts, Once the World’s Biggest Currency Fund

John Taylor Vows Return to Currency Management After Bankruptcy

John Taylor, the founder of what was once the world’s biggest currency hedge fund, said he plans re-enter the foreign-exchange asset-management business again one day in the wake of the bankruptcy of FX Concepts LLC. Read more of this post

Zong Qinghou, The Billionaire Who Lives on $20 a Day

Zong Qinghou, The Billionaire Who Lives on $20 a Day

Posted by JobStreet.com Singapore on Jan 10, 2014 in Talent of the Month | Comments Off

“For a long time, I couldn’t even afford food and clothing. I climbed from the very bottom of the society.” –Zong Qinghou

But Zong doesn’t look like your average multi-billion dollar CEO. He wears average clothes, eats tofu and pickled vegetables for lunch with his employees in the staff canteen and lives off of $20 a day. His hard work and meticulousness are also praised by his employees and business partners. It’s no wonder he has grown his business from a small shop serving school children to a successful empire that continues to grow.Zong Qinghou is the Founder and CEO of Hangzhou Wahaha Group.  The most impressive thing about Zong is his humble beginnings, focused mindset and simple lifestyle. Zong went from selling soda and popsicles to schoolchildren to owning 15% of China’s soft drinks market and becoming the wealthiest man in mainland China. Read more of this post