As an aside, I own IBM. But I've noticed over the years that a collaboration with IBM is usually a horrid idea. There's just something about whatever it is they offer that people think can be scaled, but it so often fails.
I don't keep up with IBM, but in the past it seemed to me that their hardware vs consulting (sales) businesses kept them from advancing into the 21st C. Their stock price is way off its 20 teens highs (today though it is way up!) so I hope it pays dividends. :)
 
The source is "I found it on Twitter", but the actual piece is written on the bottom of the infographic so that works for me.

It is, if translations are to be believed, an aggregate of CO2 emissions across various regions, stratified by income. The "top 10%" bar is incredibly striking, and personally validation of the argument that individual choice at our level has very little, if any, impact.
 

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The source is "I found it on Twitter", but the actual piece is written on the bottom of the infographic so that works for me.

It is, if translations are to be believed, an aggregate of CO2 emissions across various regions, stratified by income. The "top 10%" bar is incredibly striking, and personally validation of the argument that individual choice at our level has very little, if any, impact.
Still I do what I can.
 
SCIENCE OF SUCCESS | BEN COHEN

99% of Big Projects Fail. Lego Is the Fix.

An economist who studies ‘megaprojects’ says: Think slow, act fast and build brick by tiny plastic brick. One way to learn how the world’s biggest building projects work—or don’t—is to start with some of the smallest building blocks: Legos.

In the 1950s, when Lego decided to make one product the centerpiece of its business, the Danish company went looking for a single toy that could be the foundation of an empire. It picked the colorful plastic bricks that have captured the imagination of children ever since. It was a wise choice. It was also a fitting corporate strategy: Lego turned a small thing into something much bigger. “That’s the question every project leader should ask: What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big thing?” says University of Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg. “What’s our Lego?” He understands the power of Legos better than anybody, and not just because he is also Danish. Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert in the planning and management of “megaprojects,” his name for huge efforts that require at least $1 billion of investment: bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, telescopes and even the Olympics. He’s spent decades wrapping his mind around the many ways megaprojects go wrong and the few ways to get them right, and he summarizes what he’s learned from his research and real-world experience in a new book called “How Big Things Get Done.”

Spoiler alert! Big things get done very badly.
They cost too much. They take too long. They fall too short of expectations too often. This is what Dr. Flyvbjerg calls the Iron Law of Megaprojects: “over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again.” The Iron Law of Megaprojects might sound familiar to anyone who has survived a home renovation. But when Dr. Flyvbjerg dug into the numbers, the financial overruns and time delays were more common than he expected. And worse. Much worse. His seminal work on big projects can be distilled into three pitiful numbers:
  • 47.9% are delivered on budget.
  • 8.5% are delivered on budget on time.
  • 0.5% are delivered on budget, on time and with the projected benefits.

It’s brutal enough that 99.5% miss the mark in one way or another. But even those stats are misleading. The outcomes are bleaker than they look. Dr. Flyvbjerg has found that the complexity, novelty and difficulty of megaprojects heighten their risk and leave them unusually vulnerable to extreme outcomes. “You shouldn’t expect that they will go bad,” he says. “You should expect that quite a large percentage will go disastrously bad.” His quest to understand megaprojects began close to home in the 1990s. Denmark was busy with the most expensive construction undertaking in the country’s history, the Great Belt megaproject, which consisted of two bridges and a tunnel connecting the nation’s most populous islands. It was a big thing that went badly. Deadlines were blown. Plans were obliterated. Dr. Flyvbjerg was inspired.

But when he asked a basic question about megaprojects, he couldn’t find a satisfactory answer. “Despite the fact that trillions of dollars had been spent around the world on projects like this,” he said, “nobody knew if they stayed on schedule or budget.” The only way to find out was to gather the data for himself. Over the next five years, he compiled a list of 258 major infrastructure projects, including the Holland Tunnel in New York, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in California and the Channel Tunnel connecting England and France. What he learned was enough to convince him that Denmark was not an outlier. It turned out that awful performance was perfectly normal.

He wasn’t done with the subject after publishing one paper. Dr. Flyvbjerg’s unanswered question became an obsession. That first study became dozens. The original 258 became 16,000 skyscrapers, airports, museums, concert halls, nuclear reactors, roads and hydroelectric dams across 136 counand tries—not just megaprojects, but projects of all shapes and sizes. He was eager to put his findings into practice when project leaders consulted him for help. “I didn’t want to be the type of scholar who only writes for academic journals,” Dr. Flyvbjerg said. “I wanted that research to be out there in the real world.” What he tells them is that people struggle with megaprojects for a simple reason: They’re people. Humans are optimistic by nature and underestimate how long it takes to complete future tasks. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times we fall prey to this cognitive bias known as the planning fallacy. We can always ignore our previous mishaps and delude ourselves into believing this time will be different. We’re also subject to the power dynamics and competitive forces that complicate reality, since megaprojects don’t take place in controlled environments, and they are plagued by politics as much as psychology. Take funding, for example. “How do you get funding?” he said. “By making it look good on paper. You underestimate the cost so it looks cheaper, and you underestimate the schedule so it looks like you can do it faster.”

So how do big things get done? The only thing that fascinates him more than the failings of the 99.5% is why the 0.5% succeed. Dr. Flyvbjerg’s lessons that apply to any kind of project, mega or not, include two especially valuable pieces of advice.
The first one: Think slow, act fast.

The irony of megaprojects is that many are late because not enough time is spent planning, which is the most efficient way to minimize uncertainty and shrink risk. You don’t want to start digging before you know exactly what you’re doing. After he landed the job of building the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, Frank Gehry experimented with designs and tinkered with models in his studio for two years. Dr. Flyvbjerg says that meticulous planning was the reason the architectural wonder opened in 1997 on time and under its $100 million budget. But doing big things doesn’t require Frank Gehry poring over blueprints. You could just play with Legos. “It’s remarkable what you can do with blocks of Lego,” Dr. Flyvbjerg writes. “A block of Lego is a small thing, but by assembling more than 9,000 of them, you can build one of the biggest sets Lego makes.”

That’s his second piece of advice: Find the Lego that simplifies your work and makes it modular. “Modularity is a clunky word for the elegant idea of big things made from small things,” he writes. “Look for it in the world, and you’ll see it everywhere.” Everywhere includes “software, subways, hardware, hotels, office buildings, schools, factories, hospitals, rockets, satellites, cars and app stores,” he writes. “They’re all profoundly modular, built with a basic building block. They can scale up like crazy, getting better, faster, bigger and cheaper as they do.”

Tesla’s so-called gigafactories and Apple’s headquarters are good examples of modular design, Dr. Flyvbjerg says, but the more delicious one is a wedding cake. Bake one layer. Then another. Then another. Then stack them—just like Legos.
“Repeat, repeat, repeat,” he writes. “Click, click, click.” One person who saw the promise of modularity before there was a word for it was Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, who ran Lego between 1957 and 1973, a period when the business founded by his father patented the classic block that became an international sensation. Lego was known for its 265 toys at the time. Mr. Christiansen felt that was 264 too many. He wanted to concentrate Lego’s resources and create a system around one toy. “One product that was unique and lasting, that could be developed into a wider range of toys that were easy to play with, easy to produce and easy to sell,” writes Jens Andersen in another recent book, “The Lego Story.” And he knew just the one.
Lego’s bricks were modular. Lego’s business would be, too.



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Architect Frank Gehry spent two years toying with designs and models before breaking ground on the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, above, avoiding delays and overruns. Denmark’s Great Belt Bridge, below, is a classic example of a megaproject gone wrong, according to economist Bent Flyvbjerg.

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Bent Flyvbjerg has studied megaprojects for decades. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: SHAWN MICHAEL JONES FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; BENT FLYVBJERG; LARS LAURSEN/ AFP/ GETTY IMAGES; VINCENT WEST/ REUTERS


Dr. Flyvbjerg was a child in Denmark whose life was changed by that decision. In fact, whenever he needs to buy a baby gift today, he always looks for the same present.
It’s a small thing to welcome people into a world where they can do big things. “I want to be the first person in their life to give them Lego,” he said.
 
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The title got put on the end of the uri, it is


That is quite funny:

Neither WinRed nor Gerrit Lansing, founder of the startup whose software still serves as the foundation for WinRed’s service, responded to HuffPost queries for this story.

Republicans introduced WinRed during the tenure of coup-attempting former President Donald Trump, all but forcing their candidates, national parties and even state parties to use it as a way of increasing the number and frequency of small-dollar donations, an area that for a decade had been dominated by Democrats.

But unlike ActBlue, which was set up as a nonprofit, WinRed was organized as a for-profit, privately held company. Profits were to be split 60-40 between two other for-profit enterprises, Revv and Data Trust.

Data Trust was created in 2011 as the warehouse for voter data for use by Republican parties, candidates and causes, and essentially operates as a nonprofit by plowing net revenues back into the operation.

Revv, though, was founded by former RNC and former Trump White House staffer Lansing — meaning that more than half of all WinRed’s profits would flow to Lansing and his group of investors, rather than helping Republicans broadly.

Frustrations boiled over during the 2020 election cycle, when WinRed, according to Republicans familiar with the finances, made over $10 million.
 
Classic Republican cannibalism.
 
Happens before the election? The Democrats eat you after. ;)
 
The Adani cloud over India Al Jazeera Report by Hindenburg Research

Amid the usual traffic snarls on one of central Mumbai’s busiest overpasses, drivers could hardly help but notice a simple, yet large, hand-painted slogan proclaiming that the rapidly rising wealth of businessmen Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani was a miracle of Narendra Modi’s government.

In the city’s stock market, however, Adani’s wealth, which has increased by more than $100bn in less than a decade, was eroding faster than the paint on the slogan could dry. Adani’s self-named conglomerate grew by running a rapidly increasing share of India’s public infrastructure including ports, airports, power plants and coal mines.

However, a recent report by the New York-based activist short-seller Hindenburg Research showed a vast array of offshore entities with ties to the Adani group, which it indicated may have been used to inflate profits, hide losses or blur ownership. The report, titled Adani Group: How The World’s 3rd Richest Man Is Pulling The Largest Con In Corporate History, said the group was involved in “brazen stock manipulation and accounting fraud”.

Hindenburg’s report came just as the 200 billion rupees ($2.5bn) follow-on public offer of Adani group’s flagship Adani Enterprises was to open on the Bombay Stock Exchange. The group hit back at the report on the day of the public offer opening, January 27, saying it was an “attack on India”. It put out a 432-page response and scrambled to get the public offering subscribed.

But stock prices for group companies continued to fall and Adani Enterprises said it would scrap the offering, even though it had been fully subscribed and the money returned to investors.

“Many of the Vinod Adani-associated entities have no obvious signs of operations, including no reported employees, no independent addresses or phone numbers and no meaningful online presence,” the report said. “Despite this, they have collectively moved billions of dollars into Indian Adani publicly listed and private entities, often without required disclosure.”
 
Ignorance Really Is Bliss When It Comes to Investing

Investors have more information than ever. It not only isn’t helping, it’s hurting. The reason why is fascinating.

The opening shot in “Animal House” pans across the campus of idyllic Faber College, focusing on a statue of its founder inscribed with the words “KNOWLEDGE IS GOOD.” The statement is so obvious as to be laughable—the perfect way to kick off an hour and 49 minutes of not-so-subtle humor. But is knowing more always good? In investing at least, it isn’t. It could even hurt. Wall Street traders surround themselves with screens crammed with blinking numbers and charts— four are now par for the course, but six or even eight have become common. And fund managers can consult thousands of Wall Street analysts for their forecasts and opinions before buying a stock. At least 30 follow Apple. Many also employ in-house analysts and rent Bloomberg terminals for $30,000 a year. Retail investors have narrowed the information gap tremendously with access to armies of amateur analysts through services like SeekingAlpha and data feeds resembling those pricey terminals.

A fascinating experiment explains why both pros and amateurs probably should save their money. In 1973 psychologist Paul Slovic gathered eight talented handicappers to guess the outcome of 40 actual horse races in four rounds. The names of the jockeys and steeds were hidden, but the handicappers could ask for five pieces of information from a set list of 88. They were also asked to say how confident they felt. The handicappers did well, reaching 17% accuracy compared with 10% if they had guessed blindly. Their confidence was almost exactly right too at 19%. In the next three rounds they could ask for 10, 20 and finally 40 bits of information and their level of conviction rose steadily, reaching 34%. But their accuracy? It stayed at 17%.

At a real horse track, though, or in the stock market, detailed knowledge emboldens people to make riskier bets. Reports making confident predictions filled with complicated calculations or claiming inside knowledge can override the common sense of pros and amateurs alike.
In October 2001, with suspicions swirling, five Goldman Sachs analysts wrote an 11-page report calling Enron “still the best of the best” after they had extensive conversations with top management: “our confidence level is high.” The stock rallied by as much as 8% over the next two trading sessions. Enron would file for America’s largest-ever bankruptcy within weeks.

When millions of young investors opened their first brokerage accounts during the pandemic’s first year, many took cues from “finfluencers” who spoke their language or peers using pseudonyms. Social-media site Reddit has a forum with more than half a million members following a single company, AMC Entertainment Holdings. The problem with crowdsourcing research on social media is that people mainly find evidence that supports their existing thesis. Psychologists call this confirmation bias. “Ideally, you find a tribe that’s encouraging you to look at the other side,” says Rishi Khanna, chief executive of StockTwits, one of the earliest and largest investing- focused social networks, with around seven million users. He says the bias is overwhelmingly bullish. Official Wall Street is hardly more balanced. A report by FactSet last April showed that, of 10,821 analyst ratings on stocks in the S& P 500, fewer than 6% were sell recommendations.

Bad takes abound, but legitimately valuable knowledge can overwhelm users too. Leigh Drogen founded a firm called Estimize that queries pros and amateurs on things like earnings estimates. Its polls are more accurate than the consensus of stock analysts, but not always. He says that snapping up every bit of data and expecting it to work consistently often tripped up his clients. “Paying attention to five things in a highly efficient, systematic way will always beat paying attention to 50 in an undisciplined way,” he says. The fire hose of information available to retail investors through their smartphones is even worse. When millennial-focused broker Robinhood sold shares to the public in 2021, it revealed that active customers checked the app more than seven times a day on average. The knowledge they gleaned from looking so frequently was almost certainly detrimental.

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ROBERT NEUBECKER

One reason is a phenomenon called myopic loss aversion. The more often one looks at a financial account the more likely one is to see a loss and, since losses bother us more than gains, they spur turnover. Investors who trade the least often make the most, and vice versa, even after adjusting for trading costs, according to a landmark study “Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth” by professors Brad Barber and Terrance Odean.

The explosion of financial data and the ease of instantly trading on it also creates more mistakes, though occasionally they are pleasant ones. Some investors made fortunes accidentally buying Sysco, the restaurant- supply giant, instead of Cisco Systems, the computer-networking company, for example, or an all-but-defunct company called Zoom Technologies when they meant to invest in work-from-home standby Zoom Video Communications.

Just like Bluto’s motivational speech in “Animal House” about the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor, the trick is riding the craziness and then getting out of town in time.
—Spencer Jakab
 
I can vouch for that.

I was one of the people who jumped in at the beginning of the pandemic. I looked at a small set of numbers. Liability to asset ratio was a big one because companies that are less leveraged have a better chance of surviving the lockdowns. Also looked at the stock performance in the time leading up to the pandemic, to see if beat-up stocks were a good deal.

Then added in some qualitative analysis. $RCL was good because people who go on cruises are hardcore fans and would be back. Jumped on $HOG because it tanked when they closed the factory for an outbreak. But the numbers were good and Harley riders are fanboys. That's been one of my biggest winners.

Bought $NYCB last week after a tip on another message board. Their stock is down because people are freaked out over Silicon Valley Bank. NYCB is on better footing and I have the dividend yield in the short run and the price rebound in the long run.

The less noise the better. Follow the balance sheet, the PE ratio, and the dividend yield.
 
The future is coming!

Online-Books Lawsuit Tests the Limits of Libraries

BY ERIN MULVANEY AND JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG

A federal judge on Monday will weigh pleas by four major book publishers to stop an online lending library from freely offering digital copies of books, in a case that raises novel questions about digital-library rights and the reach of copyright law that protects the work of writers and publishers. Nonprofit organization Internet Archive created the digital books, building its collection by scanning physical book copies in its possession. It lends the digital versions to readers worldwide, with more than three million digitized books on offer. The archive expanded its digital lending during the Covid-19 pandemic, temporarily lifting limits on how many people could check out a book at one time. The move helped prompt the publishers’ copyright infringement lawsuit in 2020, which is pending before U.S. District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan.

The plaintiffs are Lagardère SCA’s Hachette Book Group, John Wiley & Sons Inc., Bertelsmann SE’s Penguin Random House, and HarperCollins Publishers, which like The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp. They argue the Internet Archive book platform “constitutes willful digital piracy on an industrial scale” and hurts writers and publishers who rely on consumers buying their products. William Adams, general counsel for HarperCollins Publishers, said the archive’s approach has no basis in law. “What they’re doing is supplanting what authors and publishers do with libraries and have been doing for a long time,” he said.

The Internet Archive says its lending practices are a fair and legal use of the books, in the same way that traditional bricks-and-mortar libraries have a right to share their collections with the public. “The stakes are high because we’re in a situation where libraries and readers want to access books,” said Corynne McSherry, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital-rights group that is part of the legal team representing Internet Archive. Ms. McSherry said authors and publishers aren’t suffering financial harm from libraries that want to curate their own collection of digital titles. At the center of the dispute is a growing practice that supporters call controlled digital lending, in which a library owns a physical copy of a book, digitizes it and then loans out the digital version to one borrower at a time.

Advocates say the approach can be particularly beneficial for older and less popular titles for which publisher-issued ebooks might not be available. The model stands in contrast to the industry-blessed approach in which libraries pay publishers to license ebooks for lending to the public. Judge Koeltl is weighing motions from both sides seeking a final ruling in their favor.

The case follows earlier battles focused on a book database created by Alphabet Inc.’s Google. The company scanned millions of titles and allowed users to search for specific terms and view snippets of books—but not the entire works—in which those terms appeared.
Lower courts ruled that Google’s actions constituted fair use of authors’ works. By effectively building a search-able digital card catalog, Google’s actions created significant public benefits, a judge found. The Supreme Court declined to review the case, turning away an appeal by the Authors Guild and individual writers. The guild is supporting the publishers in the new litigation. “A real library pays for their books,” said Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of the Authors Guild. “If this conduct is normalized, there would be no point to the Copyright Act,” said Maria Pallante, chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, whose members include consumer, academic and professional publishers. “It would effectively render the rights of authors, including the right to market and monetize their works, meaningless.”

Dueling groups of intellectual- property scholars have weighed in on the case. Academics backing the publishers say the Internet Archive and its supporters in the library community are seeking a wide-ranging exception to copyright law that can be granted only by Congress. Professors supporting the Internet Archive say the publishers’ position could limit the work and utility of libraries in the digital era. Juliya Ziskina, a policy fellow with the Library Futures Institute, a group that advocates for digital lending, said the future of lending is at stake.
“Copyright law doesn’t stand in the way of lending a book to one person at a time via the Internet,” she said.

The plaintiffs say the Internet Archive book platform constitutes piracy.
 
"Economics is an incredibly powerful tool for predicting the past." unknown Economics professor.
 
Plunging coca prices create ‘humanitarian emergency’ in Colombia

Farmers in parts of Colombia say sales of coca, the raw ingredient used to make cocaine, have collapsed after a recent surge in production of the illicit drug.

“We’ve seen a complete collapse of buyers,” said Andres Rojas, a coca farmer in the Catatumbo region who advocates for sustainable farming practices among growers. “Entire crops are going unsold, and families are going hungry.”

Representatives from farming associations in Catatumbo, Nariño, Cauca and Putumayo, the biggest coca-producing regions in the country, have called the economic fallout of the collapse a “humanitarian emergency”.

Rojas explained that, in recent years, many farmers in Catatumbo abandoned food crops in favour of growing coca,  in part because transporting harvests from remote regions to sell in urban centres is cost prohibitive and difficult, given the lack of rural infrastructure.

As a result, many communities are now dependent on the illicit coca economy.

“Rising coca prices in recent years meant many farmers chose to plant coca exclusively,” he said. “This lack of agricultural and economic diversity means the community is even more hard hit [by the drop in prices]. Many people don’t even grow food crops anymore.”

He called for the reinstatement of government-led coca-substitution programmes, which would pay farmers coca-growing regions to cultivate alternative crops.

Those programmes were an integral part of Colombia’s 2016 peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest rebel group at the time.

But when President Ivan Duque came to power in 2018, the government shifted to more aggressive “war on drugs” tactics, rather than pursuing social solutions to coca production.

The coca-substitution programmes were largely stonewalled and even dismantled.

“The government needs to show that it has the will, and the ability, to live up to its promises,” said Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli, Andes director for the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

She explained that most farmers who signed up for previous crop-substitution programmes were left in the lurch, when they eradicated their coca crops on the promise of government payments that never arrived.

“We aren’t drug lords,” he said. “We are the rural poor. We are farmers. We are the bottom of the pyramid in this industry. And our community needs to diversify agricultural production to survive.”

“But as long as the government refuses to encourage the development of other options, this dependence will continue.”
 
THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR | JASON ZWEIG
The Reason the Pros Don’t Beat The Market: They Can’t Be You

Professional fund managers labor under handicaps that amateur investors don’t face

Investing is one of the few areas of life in which amateurs can— and should—outperform professionals. The individual investors who have spent the past few years trying to beat the pros at their own game by chasing hot stocks have it all wrong. Instead, you should play a different game entirely. A growing body of evidence shows that fund managers labor under handicaps that individual investors don’t face. Those handicaps counteract the professionals’ obvious advantages over amateurs—including vast experience and expertise, powerful computers, instantaneous access to oceans of data and the ability to trade thousands of times a second. Consider a new study that looked at the returns of more than 7,800 U.S. stock mutual funds from 1991 through 2020. It measured their returns against those of a market-matching S& P 500 exchange- traded fund and the total U.S. stock market. The comparisons covered monthly, annual and 10-year periods, as well as each fund’s longest track record, within those three decades.

On average, only 46% of funds outperformed the total market over monthly horizons; 39% beat the market over 12-month periods; 34% over decadelong horizons; and a mere 24% for their full history. Fees are part of the problem, of course. The typical fund charged a bit more than 1% in annual expenses over the period, according to the study’s authors, finance professors Hendrik Bessembinder of Arizona State University, Michael Cooper of the University of Utah and Feng Zhang of Southern Methodist University. The typical fund returned an average of 7.7% annually over the three decades, after fees. Fund investors, however, earned only 6.9% annually because of their chronic compulsion to chase hot performance and flee when it goes cold. Such buy-high-and-sell-low behavior tends to flood fund managers with cash at times when stocks have already risen in price—and to force the funds to sell stocks after a decline. The managers can perform only as well as their worst investors allow them to. That cost of “being human,” as Prof. Bessembinder puts it, is almost as high as the drag from annual fees.

Overall, the study finds, investors sacrificed $1.02 trillion in wealth by investing in funds mostly run by stock pickers instead of buying and holding a market-tracking S& P 500 index fund. I think another factor is at work here, too. Total-market index funds consist of about 4,000 stocks, but fund managers have to be choosier than that to justify their fees. On average, actively managed U.S. funds hold 160 stocks, according to Morningstar. In the long run, however, nearly all the market’s return comes from a remarkably small number of stocks—giant winners that rise in value by 10,000% or more over the course of decades. Investor and financial historian William Bernstein of Efficient Frontier Advisors in Eastford, Conn., calls such companies “superstocks.” Earlier research by Prof. Bessembinder shows that less than half of all stocks even generate positive returns over their publicly traded lifetimes, and that only 4.3% of stocks created all the net gains in the U.S. market between 1926 and 2016. That means searching for the next superstocks is like hunting for a few needles in an immense field of haystacks. And professional investors, by design, can’t search the whole field and all the haystacks.

Unsurprisingly, other studies have shown that, on average, the fewer stocks a fund owns, the lower its returns. Over the periods of three, five, 10, 15, 20 and 25 years ended March 31, U.S. stock mutual funds holding at least 100 positions outperformed those with fewer than 50, according to Morningstar. Over all the same periods, except the past five years, the most diversified funds also earned higher returns than those with 50 to 99 holdings. If, for instance, you’d invested $10,000 on April 1, 1998, in funds holding at least 100 stocks, you’d have earned an average of 7.4% annually through this March 31. That compares with 7.0%, on average, in funds with between 50 and 99 holdings and 6.5% in those that held fewer than 50 stocks. The effect is stronger among ETFs, where those with fewer holdings tend to be even more concentrated in a single industry or a narrow slice of the market.

If fund managers could stick to only their best ideas, they might do better. But owning just a handful of stocks could create tax and regulatory headaches—and would expose the managers to massive withdrawals (and loss of fees) if returns faltered. So most portfolio managers own too many stocks to focus on their best ideas—but not enough to maximize the odds of finding a giant winner. Individual investors, by contrast, can capture every needle in all the haystacks with a total-market index fund. Then you can add the potential for outperformance by trying to pick the next superstocks yourself.

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Unfortunately, many individual investors diversify by adding big, household-name companies too similar to what they already own, or by following the crowd into whatever’s red-hot. Instead, search for superstocks among smaller, unfamiliar firms that have a proven ability to raise prices without losing business. Limit yourself to a handful of possibilities, don’t put more than a total of 5% of your money in them and never add new money even if they go up. That way you can make a lot if you land a big winner, but you can’t lose much on the losers.
If you do find what you think is a likely superstock, you—unlike a professional— can hold for as long as it takes to reap a giant gain.

In the long run, you can’t beat the pros by trading faster or by joining a meme-stock mob. The way to outperform isn’t by blending into the herd, but by standing apart from it.
 
That is a highly misleading article lol. If the author stood to gain financially from people taking his bad advice I would say he should be prosecuted.
 
What is misleading about it?
 
Proportion of corporation tax paid by 10 multinationals rose to 57% in 2022 - Revenue
[Revenue refers to the Irish tax collection agency the Revenue Commissioners and corporation tax is the income tax levied on company profits]
The top payers would presumably be the likes of Apple, Google/Alphabet, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, Dell on the tech side and Medtronic, maybe Pfizer, Abbvie in pharmaceuticals and medical devices.
These companies are making bumper profits and paying bumper taxes.
The government has been stressing how unsustainable these might be as they come under pressure to spend the surplus being generated.
An analysis by Revenue of corporation tax returns last year has revealed that the proportion paid by just ten multinationals rose to 57%.

Last year the amount of corporation tax collected by the State rose by 48% to €22.7 billion. This year, it is forecast to rise again to over €24 billion.

Last year the top ten multinationals located in Ireland paid a lot more tax on their profits.

It had been believed that the top ten firms paid just over half of all corporation tax. Today's figures reveal that the concentration of tax paid by the top ten has increased to 57%
 
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