December 15: Sunday Funday #31
Articles, streams and books that caught our attention this week
Articles 📰
The Virtuous Circle of a Happy Personality
“Thanks to such studies, we can also break down life satisfaction into three components and see how different personality traits affect our happiness in various ways. For example, relationship satisfaction (with an intimate partner) is best predicted by high agreeableness, extroversion, and conscientiousness, and low neuroticism. Meanwhile, high conscientiousness best predicts worksatisfaction, while agreeableness and extroversion are associated with highest social satisfaction. Very conscientious people tend to have good marriages and jobs; very agreeable people tend to have plenty of good friends.”
BuzzFeed Strikes Deal to Sell ‘Hot Ones’ Company for $82.5 Million
“The sale unwinds the vestiges of a deal, struck three years ago, to acquire Complex, a rival company that owned First We Feast and is known for its coverage of pop culture. The deal helped BuzzFeed go public, but the company’s stock has since fallen, as investors grew increasingly bearish on digital media.”
New eras, same bubbles: the forgotten lessons of history
“As US equity markets trace the contours of the third great speculative bubble in history, investor confidence in a new economic era has reached extreme levels… Similar to its predecessors, this speculative episode has been accompanied by exuberant sentiment about innovation-led growth, perpetual expansion in profits, and a tendency among investors to root expectations about economic and investment prospects in optimism. As The Business Week observed in 1929: “This illusion is summed up in the phrase ‘the new era’. The phrase itself is not new. Every period of speculation rediscovers it.”
iOS 18.2 Review: The AI Apple Promised Us
“Yes, behold Genmoji. Arriving Wednesday as part of iOS 18.2, Apple’s make-your-own-emoji machine is just one of several long-awaited Apple Intelligence tools, along with Image Playground and integrated ChatGPT. The catch? These features require an iPhone 15 Pro or the latest iPhone 16 models. And the real star, Visual Intelligence, only runs on the 16. So, let’s call this column what it is: my iPhone 16 re-review.”
Why Not Tell Someone They Look Great Today?
“Mood-lifting aside, there are other benefits to striking up conversations about someone’s personal style. “Perhaps it is in this age where Instagram or every website browser is trying to sell you things you already own,” said the sommelier Victoria James,. “But I lean now more heavily toward personal recommendations.”
Milk chocolate or dark? The answer could affect your risk of diabetes.
“A large new study suggests there might be good reason to indulge in chocolate this holiday season: It found that people who regularly ate chocolate had a lower likelihood of developing Type 2 diabetes. But the findings came with an important caveat. It was only…”
This Carcinogen Keeps Cropping Up in Personal Care Products
“Benzene seems to have cropped up everywhere in recent years. First, it was hand sanitizers with “unacceptable levels” of the carcinogen. Then there were recalls of antifungal foot sprays and alarming reports of tainted deodorants, dry shampoos and sunscreens.”
What We’re Streaming 📺📲
The Reading List 📖📚
We’re going to cheat a bit this week as we get caught up on reading the books we’ve shared with you over the last several weeks. So, here is Bloomberg’s annual list of Top Business Leaders Pick the Year’s 49 Best Books
Enjoy!
Don’t be a stranger
Thanks for reading and if you have a suggestion for an article or book we should read, or a stream we should catch, email us at info@tematicaresearch.com. The same email works if you want to know more about our thematic and targeted exposure models listed below.
The Strategies Behind Our Thematic Models
Aging of the Population - Capturing the demographic wave of the aging population and the changing demands it brings with it.
Artificial Intelligence – Software, chips, and related companies that facilitate the collection and analysis of large data sets and autonomous generation of solutions given non-machine language prompts.
Cash Strapped Consumer - Companies poised to benefit as consumers stretch the disposable spending dollars they do have.
CHIPs Act – Capturing the reshoring of the US semiconductor industry and the $52.7 billion poised to be spent on semiconductor manufacturing.
Cloud Computing – Companies that provide hardware and services that enhance the cloud computing experience for users, such as co-location, security, and edge computing.
Core Holdings – Companies that reflect economic activity and are large enough to not get pushed around by day-to-day market trends. Low-beta, large-cap names able to better withstand economic turmoil.
Cybersecurity - Companies that focus on protecting against the penetration of digital networks and the theft, ransom, corruption or destruction of data.
Data Privacy & Digital Identity - Companies providing the tools and services that verify authorized users and safeguard personal data privacy.
Digital Infrastructure & Connectivity -The buildout and upgrading of our Networks, Data Storage Facilities, and Equipment.
Digital Lifestyle - The companies behind our increasingly connected lives.
Digital Payments - This model focuses on companies benefitting from the accelerating structural adoption of digital payments and financial technology (FinTech).
EPS Diplomats - Profitable large capitalization companies proven to produce above-average EPS growth and provide investors with the benefit of multiple expansion.
EV Transition - Capturing the transition to EVs and related infrastructure from combustion engine vehicles.
Guilty Pleasure – Companies that produce/provide food and drink products that consumers tend to enjoy regardless of the economic environment and potential long-term health hazards associated with excessive consumption.
Homebuilding & Materials – Ranging from homebuilders to key building product companies that serve the housing market, this model looks to capture the rising demand for housing, one that should benefit as the Fed returns monetary policy to more normalized levels.
Luxury Buying Boom - Tapping into aspirational buying and affluent buyers amid rising global wealth.
Market Hedge Model – This basket of daily reset swap-based broad market inverse ETFs protects in the face of market pullbacks, overbought market technicals, and other drivers of market volatility.
Nuclear Energy & Uranium – Companies that either build and maintain nuclear power plants or are involved in the production of uranium.
Rebuilding America - Turning the focused spending on rebuilding US infrastructure into revenue and profits.
Safety & Security – Targeted exposure to companies that provide goods and services primarily to the Defense and security sectors of the economy.
Space Economy – Companies that focus on the launch and operation of satellite networks.
The Strategies Behind Our Dividend Income Models
Monthly Dividend Model – Pretty much what the name says – this model invests in companies that pay monthly dividends to shareholders.
ETF Dividend Model – High-yielding ETFs that provide a range of exposures from domestic equities, international equities, emerging market equities, MLPS, and REITs.
ETF Enhanced Dividend Model – A group of high-yielding ETFs that utilize options to enhance yield through collecting option income.
Don’t be a stranger
Thanks for reading and if you have a suggestion for an article or book we should read, or a stream we should catch, email us at info@tematicaresearch.com. The same email works if you want to know more about our thematic and targeted exposure models listed above.