This week’s highlights: Essential Oils, CEO Pay, and the Future of Agriculture.

Fifteen on Friday – 10/06/17 – Issue 256

Happy Friday and Fall Break to many!  We published our Q3’17 market commentary this week entitled “The Beat Goes On“.  If you want a quick, four page take on what is going in the financial markets currently, I would encourage you to take a look.

Food for Thought:

1. TC – 12 Questions That Will Change Your Life
2. NewYorker – How Essential Oils Became the Cure for Our Age of Anxiety.  Aromatic oils have become big business. But are they medicine or marketing?
3. Wired – No Inflation?  Technology May Have Left It Back in the 20th Century – Credit SF
4. Eater – As Goes the Middle Class, So Goes TGI Fridays – Credit JG – The End of Flair – What one typical American town reveals about the fate of the great suburban chain restaurant.
5. Marketwatch – Why young kids should spend all day in nature instead of being cooped up inside a classroom.  What if there were a better way to do early childhood education?  Meet the Forest Kindergarten.

Business/Economics:

1. LightfieldCap – “What am I really paying for?”.  A thoughtful consideration of the risks that any fixed income investor incurs when they buy a Treasury.
2. WSJ – Companies That Perform Best Don’t Pay CEOs the Most.  Best-paid chiefs among the worst performers averaged $10 million a year more than their peers, study finds.  An interesting companion piece would be this – NYT – When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer
3. Economist – American entrepreneurship is flourishing, if you know where to look.  The high-growth kind has rebounded sharply from lows after the Great Recession.
4. II – Skilled Managers “Should and Actually Do” Hold Fewer Stocks.  The better the investor, the more concentrated the fund manager’s portfolio was likely to be, according to a new research paper.
5. ZH – It Has Never Been Cheaper To Hedge A Market Crash Using This One Trade.  A look at global asset class volatility premia.

Culture/Tech/Science:

1. NatGeo – This Tiny Country Feeds the World.  The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant by showing what the future of farming could look like.
2. Economist – Tiny robots will inspect and fix jet engines from the inside
3. 60min – Will Christian Pulisic be the next big name in soccer? – Credit CT – The 19-year-old from Pennsylvania is already a millionaire pro-soccer player in Germany, but his U.S. coach says he could be the sport’s “first American superstar”
4. FastCo – Even This Data Guru Is Creeped Out By What Anonymous Location Data Reveals About Us.  Using code and the web, a data scientist follows two unnamed people and learns just how much our anonymous location data can say about who we are.
5. Adweek – The Story Behind Big League Chew, the Shredded Gum That Benched Tobacco in a Minor League Dugout.  Major childhood flashback here.