Category: Stocks

Hulu’s WeWork doc tries to recapture the energy of the 2019 saga

Posted onAuthoradmin

In fall 2019, the story of WeWork’s Icarian plummet —from the startup destined to change the way we work and live to the laughing stock of Wall Street—played out with all the drama you’d expect when at its center are a messianic CEO and a Japanese billionaire enabling his reckless whims. As you may recall, former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann had a vision of creating a culture of communal workspaces that was turbocharged by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son investing more than $10 billion in WeWork with a mandate to Neumann to think bigger. WeWork soared to a $47 billion valuation and was on the precipice of going public until its prospectus raised a sea of red flags —from the company reporting $900 million in losses and $47 billion in lease obligations to Neumann’s wife, Rebekah, being granted the power to name his successor should anything happen to him. It was a tale of staggering hubris, lavish excess, and toxic leadership that became catnip for a storm of media coverage. Indeed, in today’s insatiable market for content for video streaming and on-demand audio, the WeWork saga inspired a flurry of deals to turn this story into tragedy, farce, or a bit of both. Last year there was Wondery’s deep-dive podcast miniseries WeCrashed , and New York Magazine contributor Reeves Wiedeman published the book Billion Dollar Loser. Yet to come is the book The Cult of We from Wall Street Journal reporters Maureen Farrell and Eliot Brown, which is being adapted into a limited series with Succession breakout star Nicholas Braun. Another forthcoming book, about SoftBank, from Fast Company contributor Katrina Booker, was fast-tracked for a TV series from Blumhouse. An Apple TV Plus limited series starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as the Neumanns has also been announced Read More …

Robinhood makes Wall Street feel like a game to win—not a place where you can lose your savings

Posted onAuthoradmin

Wall Street has long been likened to a casino . Robinhood, an investment app that just filed plans for an initial public offering , makes the comparison more apt than ever . That’s because the power of the casino is the way it makes people feel like gambling their money away is a game. Casinos are full of mood lighting , fun noises, and other sensory details that reward gamblers when they place coins in slots. Similarly, Robinhood’s slick and easy-to-use app resembles a thrill-inducing video game rather than a sober investment tool. The color palette of red and green is associated with mood, with green having a calming effect and red increasing arousal, anger, and negative emotions . Picking stocks can seem like a fun lottery of scratching off the winning ticket; celebratory confetti drops from the top of the screen for the new users’ first three investments. But just as people can lose a lot of money gambling at the casino, the same thing can happen when you trade stocks and bonds—sometimes with disastrous consequences, such as last year when a Robinhood user died by suicide after mistakenly believing that he’d lost $750,000. I study how people behave inside game worlds and design classroom games . Using gamelike features to influence real-life actions can be beneficial, such as when a health app uses rewards and rankings to encourage people to move more or eat healthier food. But there’s a dark side too, and so-called gamification can lead people to forget the real-world consequences of their decisions. Games explained Generally speaking, games—whether played on a board, among children or with a computer— are voluntary activities that are structured by rules and involve players competing to overcome challenges that carry no risk outside of their virtual world. Read More …

5 hidden Google gems you aren’t using—yet

Posted onAuthoradmin

For a tool most of us use every day to find stuff on the web, Google has more than a few helpful tricks up its sleeve that aren’t super apparent unless you know where to look. Here are a few I’ve found recently that have saved me countless clicks, spared me visits to garishly designed apps, and generally made things a little less complicated. Order up some food There are enough food-ordering services out there that you might starve before flipping through them all to find something you want. Instead, just navigate to orderfood.google.com , and you’ll be presented with a map of nearby restaurants that offer pickup and delivery. Google pulls in listings from popular apps and services and lets you browse by category if you’re in the mood for a particular style of food. Once you’re ready to order, you can do so via a clean, easy, very Google-like interface instead of being shuttled off to a third-party app or site Read More …

How to prevent the next GameStop disaster

Posted onAuthoradmin

The mind-numbing inanity of last week’s GameStop hearing on Capitol Hill was just as predictable as the worthless result. Of course members of both parties wanted in on the media frenzy surrounding Robinhood and WallStreetBets, the Reddit forum where thousands of amateur investors mounted a historic campaign to pump (and dump) the stock of a left-for-dead video game retailer. Talking heads on CNBC were alarmed, and so the House Financial Services Committee ordered hearings, subpoenaed witnesses, and played for the cameras at every turn. By the end of last Thursday’s spectacle, the consensus was clear: We learned absolutely nothing. Not surprisingly, Congress focused on the wrong culprit. Yes, Robinhood’s marketing as “the platform for the average investor” ended up conflicting with their treatment of the average investor once they had to stop taking GameStop trades, making them look like greedy hypocrites. (Fast Company has a brief explainer here .) And yes, the use of Reddit and Twitter to drive market forces and propel certain stocks is new and a little scary. But Robinhood, Reddit, and Twitter were all using their platforms in the exact ways they were intended: to spread and drive information and access. If there’s a villain in the GameStop saga, it’s the federal regulators—in this case, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—who failed to notice that the world was changing and didn’t bother to update the rules accordingly. By definition, regulation will always lag behind innovation. Regulators can’t know what rules are needed until an entrepreneur first thinks of the new idea, turns it into actual technology, turns that technology into a business, and then starts selling its product or service. But once that happens, it’s not necessary to wait for a debacle before updating the rules. In the case of GameStop, the two-day settlement requirement meant that Robinhood couldn’t keep taking trades absent raising more capital. That two-day waiting period made sense in a previous era—one before blockchain and the cloud. But that waiting period still exists because of inertia and complexity—and, historically, because it produced extra revenue for brokerages—not because it’s technologically necessary. Real-time settlement is not only feasible, it would have prevented all of the harms caused to Robinhood’s investors. The SEC knows that, but it didn’t act on it. That was a mistake. GameStop is but one example. Take something more significant like self-driving cars and trucks Read More …

Remote work can’t change everything until we fix this $80 billion problem

Posted onAuthoradmin

Providing reliable, high-speed internet to remote parts of the U.S. has been a challenge for years. And the COVID-19 pandemic has created a renewed sense of urgency to solve it. Since the outbreak, many employers have outlined plans to make their remote work policies permanent. Many knowledge workers are taking this opportunity to leave big cities for more rural destinations. This presents a significant economic opportunity for rural communities, but only in those areas that can offer residents access to robust broadband internet. Finally solving America’s digital divide will depend on either a technological innovation or governmental intervention Read More …