OCTOBER 23, 2019 | The Globe and Mail | by IAN MCGUGAN

The money management industry that, in one way or another, is trying to seduce you.....The key to arriving at a mature relationship is seeing through the patter. Every fund company can trot out attractive, well-educated people with well-researched insights about the market. But look beyond the superficial charm.
More often than not, this will result in disappointment. The performance of most actively managed funds consistently lags passive market benchmarks, especially as you look at longer periods. In Canada, more than nine in every 10 funds underperformed their respective benchmarks over the 10 years to the end of 2018, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.

In the United States, similar long-term trends hold true. Even the endowments of Ivy League universities, managed by teams of highly paid professionals, have failed to keep pace with a simple 60/40 portfolio of 60 per cent U.S. stocks and 40 per cent U.S. bonds over the past decade, according to research firm Markov Processes International. One simple lesson to take away from this is that indexing should be the default strategy for most small investors. Unless you have a strong view of where the market is going next, or a compelling reason to believe in a specific money manager, putting money into a low-cost, widely diversified index fund makes sense. No, it’s not going to work all the time – no investing strategy does – but it is hard to shrug off the long-term evidence of superior performance.

John Huber at Saber Capital Management, is often asked what his edge, or advantage, is. “Institutional investors seem especially interested in this question, and the edge that they are almost always looking for is some form of informational edge or insight that the rest of the market isn’t aware of,”......The problem is that such edges don’t exist any more. Oceans of financial and corporate information are available to any professional investor. Legions of professionals pore over that data, looking for reasons to buy or sell. Nobody knows more than anyone else – at least, not legally.......The only sustainable edge, Mr. Huber argues, is maintaining a different time horizon than the overall market.....

I went through almost all of my emotions on the way home from #gamescom : #fear #sadness #disappointment #dread…

March 15, 2019 | Financial Times | by Janan Ganesh.

"Disappointment is the natural order of life. Most people achieve less than they would like".

Failure — not spectacular failure, but failure as gnawing disappointment — is the natural order of life. Most people will achieve at least a little bit less than they would have liked in their careers. Most marriages wind down from intense passion to a kind of elevated friendship, and even this does not count the roughly four in 10 that collapse entirely. Most businesses fail. Most books fail. Most films fail.

You would hope that something so endemic to the human experience would be constantly discussed and actively prepared for. Ganesh regrets that failure is unacknowledged, little discussed, except as a character-building phase.....For many people, failure will be just that, not a nourishing experience or a bridge to something else. It will be a lasting condition, and it will sting a fair bit.......Our inability to look [commonness of failure] in the eye is...inadvertently [making] the experience of failure more harrowing than it needs to be. By reimagining it as just a [way station] before ultimate triumph, those who find themselves stuck there must feel like aberrations, when their experience could not be more banal......[in some cases, career failure]...was just the law of numbers doing its impersonal work.....In almost all professions, there are too few places at the top for too many hopefuls. Lots of blameless people will miss out. Whether at school or through those excruciating management guides, a wiser culture would not romanticise failure as a means to success. It would normalise it as an end......Those who overcome setbacks to achieve epic feats tend to universalise their atypical experience. Amazingly bad givers of advice, they encourage people to proceed with ambitions that are best sat on, and despise “quitters” when quitting is often the purest common sense.

JULAINE TREUR
CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 3, 2018

Each foreign dairy product on store shelves displaces dairy produced here in Canada, by Canadian farmers for Canadian consumers. This affects Canadian jobs and the livelihood of our farmers and their families. In order to produce milk in Canada, dairy farmers must purchase a share of the market, commonly called quota. This quota is measured in kilograms and one kilogram of quota is roughly the amount of butterfat a cow will produce in one day. A kilogram of quota ranges in price from province to province, from around $20,000 to $40,000 per kilo. Our farmers have paid good money for the ability to produce milk for their fellow citizens and now another portion of our market has just been given away.

A good chunk of our monthly milk cheque goes to mortgage payments on this quota as well as on our land and buildings. That cheque will be smaller once this deal comes into effect as we will be forced to cut back production by selling some of the cows in our herd, but we will still be required to make the same payments to the bank for quota that will be taken away from us.

For us, on our farm, we will be forced to take another hard look at our finances. We’ll likely put some projects on hold and re-evaluate any significant farm-related purchases. We’ll continue keeping the same long hours and working just as hard as we always have.

don't ever dream

Don't ever dream.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. In the centre of the field, shaded from the autumn sun, a lean young man in white stands, feet apart; a slight hunch to his shoulders, a frown of concentration on his boyish face. He studies his mark until the whistle blows, then takes six, maybe seven steps forward,…

The post When heroes could’ve been legends: England, Sven and the disappointment of a tepid 2002 World Cup campaign appeared first on These Football Times.

via When heroes could’ve been legends: England, Sven and the disappointment of a tepid 2002 World Cup campaign

Michael Skapinker

If you are one of these thwarted pyramid climbers, how do you cope? Here are five suggestions.

■ Ask yourself how much you really wanted it. No one gets to the top without personal sacrifice.....Possibly your unwillingness to make those sacrifices on the way up is what cost you that final promotion in the first place. Or possibly something else:

■ You just weren’t good enough......Think of how many people did not rise to your level and value what you did achieve.

■ It’s not over until it’s over. ....The new incumbent could quit...

■ Do something else. There is a whole world out there.... start a start-up...join a non-profit..if you have plenty of money....spend time travelling, learning a language or writing a book.
■ There are more important things in life. ....It leaves little time for reading, hobbies, artistic endeavours — all the things you will need for a fulfilling life when the job is over. You can catch up with those pursuits later, but what you cannot recover are the family and friends you neglected on the way. Treat them as you would want to be treated while you are working and they will always be there for you. That promotion you might have got is no match for that.

But white male anger is steeped in a lie. It is fighting for what they were never going to have. For the promises that were never going to be fulfilled. White men are the only people allowed to fully believe in the American dream and perhaps that is the cruelest thing to have ever been done to them and the world that has to suffer their anger as they refuse to let go of a fantasy that we were never allowed to imagine ourselves in.
White men who shoot up schools and workplaces are not murderous monsters, or mindless thugs. They are “lovesick” or “misunderstood” or “tragic.” Hundreds of thousands of words are dedicated to finding the reasons why someone with so much promise could have fallen so far.
But how much promise was there really?
How much promise is there in a life where you are told that all you have to do is exist in order to inherit a kingdom. How much promise is there in a life where your mediocrity is constantly applauded and every hero looks like you and every love interest is a supermodel, but at the end of the day you will be working in a cubicle with everyone else and your only consolation is that you will be making $1.50 an hour more than the women and people of color in your office?
How much promise is there in being told that your culture is the only one worth knowing, and that your language is the only one worth speaking? How much promise is there in never having to say your are sorry, never having to say you are wrong, never having to say you don’t know?

Todd Haselton with his list of things that he wasn't happy about. Those mentioned are Amazon, Google, LG, Fitbit, Apple and Essential.

However there's one key difference between the Apple product, and the products from the others. See if you can guess what it is before you click through.

"by Elizabeth Weil *with comments and corrections by Hannah W Duane
photograph by Tabitha Soren"

[from the annotations]

"Parents underestimate kids’ ability to figure out what is right for them. My parents originally thought the public arts high school where I just started would be a terrible choice, and now they understand how perfect it is for me."

…

"I receive, on average, a dozen book titles when I ask for a recommendation from my parents. It would be impossible to read them all. Plus, I want to choose what to focus on and file the rest away. Parents seem to need immediate return on their advice and assume no ideas get recorded for later use."

…

"Well, I wanted to know everything, back when that seemed reasonable, and I thought adults knew and understood everything, so it made sense to ask. Back then, all of my questions had answers."

…

"Adults think that kids are going to break if they hear something bad has happened. However, from a fairly young age kids know that terrible things happen, and they know when someone is trying to shelter them. It’s like when I was 4 and I found a dead robin on my grandparents’ deck, and my parents told me, “The bird is done being a bird.” That was OK, but it would have been OK, too, to just say the bird was dead. If you allow a kid to believe that things live forever, it’s going to be a worse experience later because they’re going to learn they were lied to."

…

"I think this is a complex point. It’s old-fashioned and sexist to think clothing is a major indicator of values. People should be able to wear what they want without worrying about others’ feedback."

…

"Everyone is “pretty flawed.” Isn’t the whole idea that you grow up and realize nobody is perfect and learn to live with the ways you’re messed up?"

…

"In my daily life, I take almost no risks. I do my homework; I’m absurdly early to most things. The mountains are the one place where I can relax and take advantage of this calm. I don’t know if I want a risk manager. I want to get better at accepting risk. It’s hard to learn, especially when your parents are cautious people themselves and you have anxiety about disappointing them. And yourself."

…

"I know my life is going to take some trial and error. I know I need to make the mistakes, and I know I’m going to be humiliated. I’m trying to gather up my courage. People can tell you to take deep breaths, they can tell you to close your eyes, but they can’t make you calm."

By DAVID E. SANGER and ERIC SCHMITT JUNE 12, 2017.

In 2016, U.S. cyberwarriors began training their arsenal of cyberweapons on a more elusive target, internet use by the Islamic State. Thus far, the results have been a consistent disappointment......The effectiveness of the nation’s arsenal of cyberweapons hit its limits against an enemy that exploits the internet largely to recruit, spread propaganda and use encrypted communications, all of which can be quickly reconstituted after American “mission teams” freeze their computers or manipulate their data..... the U.S. is rethinking how cyberwarfare techniques, first designed for fixed targets like nuclear facilities, must be refashioned to fight terrorist groups that are becoming more adept at turning the web into a weapon......one of the rare successes against the Islamic State belongs at least in part to Israel, which was America’s partner in the attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Top Israeli cyberoperators penetrated a small cell of extremist bombmakers in Syria months ago, the officials said. That was how the United States learned that the terrorist group was working to make explosives that fooled airport X-ray machines and other screening by looking exactly like batteries for laptop computers......ISIS' agenda and tactics make it a particularly tough foe for cyberwarfare. The jihadists use computers and social media not to develop or launch weapons systems but to recruit, raise money and coordinate future attacks.

Such activity is not tied to a single place, as Iran’s centrifuges were, and the militants can take advantage of remarkably advanced, low-cost encryption technologies. The Islamic State, officials said, has made tremendous use of Telegram, an encrypted messaging system developed largely in Germany......disruptions often require fighters to move to less secure communications, making them more vulnerable. Yet because the Islamic State fighters are so mobile, and their equipment relatively commonplace, reconstituting communications and putting material up on new servers are not difficult.

17 Dec. 2016 |Financial Times | Byline: Philip Delves Broughton.
* Stoicism is the new Zen, a rediscovered set of ideas that seem tailor-made for a period of rapid change.
* The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph by Ryan Holiday
* Keep moving forward

History will one day tell us more about the meeting this week between Donald Trump and the biggest names in Silicon Valley. We will find out why these usually swagge...