My back-to-work morning train WFH reads:

• Protect Your Parents from Scammers. I settled on advising them to say this every time a financial institution calls: “Where are you calling from? Thank you. I’m going to hang up and call back.” (Flow Financial Planning)

• When uncertainty becomes unambiguously high: And it’s not surprising. There is literally always something to be uncertain about. In fact, uncertainty defines the risk stock market investors take as they bet on a future that isn’t guaranteed. Uncertainty gives risk-tolerant investors the opportunity to buy stocks at a discount. Uncertainty is why the returns in the stock market tend to be relatively high. (TKer)  but see also The Bond Market’s Trump Trade Is Looking Like a Recession Trade: Bond traders are signaling an increasing risk that the US economy will stall as President Donald Trump’s chaotic tariff rollouts and federal-workforce cuts threaten to further restrain the pace of growth. (Bloomberg)

• The house color that tells you when a neighborhood is gentrifying: A Washington Post color analysis of D.C. found shades of gray permeate neighborhoods where the White population has increased and the Black population has decreased. (Washington Post)

• Calm Down: Bad decisions sparked by anxiety are investor’s most dangerous nemesis. Although most of our worst fears seldom come true, we attach ourselves to outcomes that don’t exist. (A Teachable Moment) see also Tune Out the Noise: My advice is to tune out the noise, turn off the TV, and avoid the trolling, wild gesticulations, and chaos. Instead, focus on what is truly happening. I admit the general demeanor feels weird because there’s been a whole lot more getting said than done; far fewer actions than the pronouncements (or stated intentions to perform actions) all of which may or may not happen. (The Big Picture)

• Palmer Luckey, Donald Trump’s Original Tech Bro, Gets His Moment: Once an outcast, the Anduril founder’s vision for modernizing the government seems possible  (WSJ)

• Top 15 Value-Creating Stocks of the Past Decade: These stocks have excelled at creating shareholder value in dollar terms. (Morningstar) see also 15 Stocks That Have Destroyed the Most Shareholder Value Over the Past Decade: These stocks have seen their market caps shrink despite a generally bullish market environment. (Morningstar)

• Cliff Asness on the Trump Market, Warren Buffett, Investing Mistakes—and Hockey: When you picture a quant hedge fund manager, you probably imagine a secretive, wildly idiosyncratic James Bond–villain type. Cliff Asness, who founded and runs AQR, one of the world’s biggest quant funds with $126 billion in assets under management, hates to disappoint you, but he doesn’t really fit the bill. (Barron’s)

• Fact-checking 26 suspect claims in Trump’s address to Congress: President makes false claims about border crossings, regulations, the economy, inflation and many other issues. (Washington Post)

• Beijing embraces DeepSeek to lead AI adoption as it looks for new growth drivers: Goldman Sachs expects China’s economy to start reflecting the positive impact of AI adoption led by DeepSeek from next year. Over the long term — by 2030 — it pegs a 20-basis-point to 30-basis-point boost to China’s GDP. DeepSeek has shaken China’s AI ecosystem as well, with state-owned entities as well as large tech players, including competitors, leveraging its open-sourced architecture. (CNBC) See also AI Will Upend a Basic Assumption About How Companies Are Organized: The economy is built on the idea that expertise is scarce and expensive. AI is about to make it abundant and practically free. (Bloomberg)

• Rock forgot one of its wildest front men. He’s got a story to tell. Peter Wolf befriended music legends, married a movie star and led the J. Geils Band. His new memoir reminds us: He was there. (Washington Post)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Philipp Carlsson, Global Chief Economist for Boston Consulting Group (BCG ). He is the co-author of “Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms: How to Assess True Macroeconomic Risk,” named one of the Financial Times Best Books of 2024.

Global temperature anomalies by El Niño and La Niña conditions Source: Our World In Data

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