• I better clean up my workspace…it could be impacting the productivity of me and the team (from Your Ability to Focus Has Probably Peaked: Here’s How to Stay Sharp with hat tip to Abnormal Returns):

This experiment, along with others, provides evidence that cluttered and disorganized environments are more distracting than organized ones. Spaces filled with visual distractions force our brains to work harder to filter out superfluous information…

• The iPhone is about to celebrate it’s 10 year anniversary, the Verge (hat tip to Big Picture Blog) has long-form article about its secret origin story which provides the messiness of innovation:

Like many mass-adopted, highly profitable technologies, the iPhone has a number of competing origin stories. There were as many as five different phone or phone-related projects — from tiny research endeavors to full-blown corporate partnerships — bubbling up at Apple by the middle of the 2000s. But if there’s anything I’ve learned in my efforts to pull the iPhone apart, literally and figuratively, it’s that there are rarely concrete beginnings to any particular products or technologies — they evolve from varying previous ideas and concepts and inventions and are prodded and iterated into newness by restless minds and profit motives. Even when the company’s executives were under oath in a federal trial, they couldn’t name just one starting place.

• More on the smartphone…this time from the sociological perspective of how much it has changed modern life (from Longreads):

The smartphone is the signature artifact of our age. Less than a decade old, this protean object has become the universal, all-but-indispensable mediator of everyday life. Very few manufactured objects have ever been as ubiquitous as these glowing slabs of polycarbonate.

For many of us, they are the last thing we look at before sleep each night, and the first thing we reach for upon waking. We use them to meet people, to communicate, to entertain ourselves, and to find our way around. We buy and sell things with them. We rely on them to document the places we go, the things we do and the company we keep; we count on them to fill the dead spaces, the still moments and silences that used to occupy so much of our lives.

• Millennials not comparison-shopping their auto insurance (15 minutes can save you…as that popular ad says), according to this USA Today story:

Millennials are the least likely age group to price check their car insurance. Among all adults who have car insurance, 17% say they’ve never shopped around for better rates, but 26% of Millennials say they’ve never checked car insurance prices. “Millennials can do a number of things in order to save on auto insurance costs,” Passmore says. “For example, we encourage everyone to shop around for the best deal. Consumers have lots of options when it comes to auto insurance coverage.”

• More data suggesting why picking stocks is a fool’s errand (Kiplinger):

Most stocks lose money. How can that be? As almost all investors know, large-company stocks have returned, on average, an annualized 10.1% since 1926. But a fascinating new academic paper finds that virtually all of those profits can be attributed to fewer than 4% of all stocks.

Authored by Hendrik Bessembinder, a finance professor at Arizona State University, the paper (Do Stocks Outperform Treasury Bills?) holds an important lesson for investors — namely that if you want to make money in the stock market, you’d better either be close to psychic in your ability to pick stocks or you’ll need to own lots of them. And the best way to accomplish owning lots of stocks is by investing in index funds. (There should be an asterisk affixed to Bessembinder’s study, however, which we’ll get to in a minute.)

• The supermarket as we know it will never be the same since Amazon acquired Whole Foods last week (NY Times):

Grocery stores have spent the last several years fighting against online and overseas entrants. But now, with its $13.4 billion purchase of Whole Foods, Amazon has effectively started a supermarket war.

Armed with giant warehouses, shopper data, the latest technology and nearly endless funds — and now with Whole Foods’ hundreds of physical stores — Amazon is poised to reshape an $800 billion grocery market that is already undergoing many changes. And much of the battle is expected to take place online, Amazon’s home turf.

• Jonathan Clements had lunch with Charlie Ellis, an investing legend, and now I think it’s time for me to read Ellis’ book “Winning the Loser’s Game (Humble Dollar blog)

AS A YOUNG REPORTER in the late 1980s, trying to learn about investing, I read a slim 81-page volume with an unassuming title: Investment Policy. It remains one of the best investment books I’ve ever read.

Investment Policy was later reissued with a somewhat catchier title, Winning the Loser’s Game, and it’s now widely considered to be an investment classic. Over the years, the book has also been greatly expanded and the 2017 edition runs to 286 pages. Recently, I was in New Haven, Conn., and had lunch with the book’s author, Charles Ellis, now age 79.

• Wonder what happened inside Wells Fargo to drive thousands of employees to create hundreds of thousands of fake accounts? Learn about the culture and incentives that led to this recent scandal (Vanity Fair with hat tip to Big Picture Blog):

It was underpinned by the financial reality that customers who had, say, lines of credit and savings accounts with the bank were far more profitable than those who just had checking accounts. In 1997, prior to Norwest’s merger with Wells Fargo, Kovacevich launched an initiative called “Going for Gr-Eight,” which meant getting the customer to buy eight products from the bank. The reason for eight? “It rhymes with GREAT!” he said.

This slogan, however, as experienced by bankers on the ground such as Hambek, was more hard-core than hokey. “We had a lot of longtime customers and a good staff, but the sales pressure kept mounting, mounting, mounting,” Hambek says. “Every morning, we had a conference call with all the managers. You were supposed to tell them how you were going to make your sales goal for the day, and if you didn’t, you’d have to call in the afternoon to explain why you didn’t make it and how you were going to fix it. It was really tense.” Achieving sales goals wasn’t easy. Ellensburg is a small town, and there were seven other banks.

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.

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