Influential Reads – September 2021 - Something For The Effort

Reading Time: 2 minutes

“A man got to have a code.” – Omar Little

Seriously? Look at the chart on the right. Talk about recency bias.

Folks are in for a rude surprise at some point in the future if they thought September was a rough stretch. That’s not a prediction of a near term melt down. It is simply an observation about investor behavior and memory.

Finally finished Principles by Ray Dalio. More to come here, but in short, I tried to read this book about 24 months ago and was just not in the right headspace apparently. This time around, I really enjoyed it. But it took some time and effort, in a good way.

Here are my most influential reads – in no particular order:

Boxes, trucks and bikes – “However, there’s also another way to split this, that I think is becoming increasingly important – instead of looking at the product category and the buying journey, look at the logistics model. “
Business History with Gary Hoover – “The whole history of business and the economy is a story of one technological disruption after the other.”
When Over-Ordering is More Than Hoarding – “So that customer who is ordering a lot more right now than they historically have is not doing it to “hoard.” They’re probably doing it just to manage inventory properly.” See this as well.
Put These Charts on Your Wall – “The market doesn’t have to do anything, least of all what you think it should do.”
How To Escape Your Financial Cocoon – “Transient events constitute our experiences. Viewing them as permanent compounds our problems.”
Worry About Yourself – “Somewhere along the way I think people forgot that we’re only in the market to make money…If others want to blow themselves up trading recklessly, let them.”
5 Ways to Build Resilience and Conquer Adversity – “Resilience is the ability to create positive adaptations to negative events. It’s the ability to take things like anger and sadness and make them useful and productive.”
The fraught future of recycling – “Despite the heavy machinery and increased automation involved, the process is still extremely dependent on humans.”
Distribution and Demand – “Whereas AT&T competes for customers in a zero sum game, content is best leveraged by reaching as many customers across as many distributors as possible”
The Intel Opportunity – “Massive demand, limited suppliers, huge barriers to entry. It’s a good time to be a manufacturing company. It is, potentially, a good time to be Intel.”
A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam – “We present evidence that in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea.” SMS here: Talk about wrong place, wrong time…

One more than normal because I could not decide. My blog, my rules…

Note: This is based on when I read the article, not necessarily when it was first published. Unfortunately, my backlog of things I would like to read always seems to dwarf the amount of time I can devote to reading.

Top clicks across the site last month:

Updated stats through September: