Here are some articles I found interesting and I hope you might find them interesting, too.

Read the details:

1,000 True Fans? Try 100

• Kevin Kelly wrote an essay called “1,000 True Fans,” predicting that the internet would allow large swaths of people to make a living off their creations, whether an artist, musician, author, or entrepreneur.
• Rather than pursuing widespread celebrity, he argued, creators only needed to engage a modest base of “true fans”—those who will “buy anything you produce”—to the tune of $100 per fan, per year (for a total annual income of $100,000).
• He believed creators could bypass traditional gatekeepers and middlemen, get paid directly by a smaller base of fans, and live comfortably off the spoils.
• As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love.
  • On Patreon, the average initial pledge amount has increased 22 percent over the past two years.
  • Since 2017, the share of new patrons paying more than $100 per month—or $1,200 per year—has grown 21 percent.
    • On the online course platform Podia, the number of creators earning more than $1,000 in a month is growing 20 percent each month,
    • While the average number of customers per creator is growing at a rate of 10 percent.
      • Likewise, on Teachable, the average price point per class offering has risen roughly 20 percent, year over year.
      • In 2019, nearly 500 Teachable course creators made more than $100,000; of those, 25 averaged more than $1,000 per sale.
• Put simply, if you can convince a small number of super-engaged people to pay more, you can also have a general audience that pays less.

Crisis Investing: How to Maximize Returns During Market Panics

• They imagine that in another March 2009 (or February 2016 or December 2018), they’ll have the fortitude to buy the dip, deploying their sleep-at-night money into risk assets at the bottom.
• In the fog of war, most people’s decision-making abilities are impaired, not heightened.
• What investors need then is a clear understanding of what worked and didn’t work in prior crises.
• We have spent the past year studying every financial crisis in the US since 1970.
• Looked at every major asset class, every sector, and every quantitative factor.
  • We looked at index-level data, and then we built a database of security-level data.
  • We read through the newspapers during each panic to understand what investors most feared.
•  This massive study into a 77-page in-depth report.
• A variation of an ancient Roman proverb says: “fortuna eruditis favet.” Fortune favors the prepared mind.

Modern Debates & Historical Context

This is what @jfc_3_ has on his article to read about., a lot of history and economics.

• Active / Passive
• The Value Factor
• ESG & Impact Investing
• Private Markets
• Low Yields & Negative Rates

Skull analysis technique shows 70% chance of recession in 2020

• There is a 70% chance of a recession within the next six months, according to a new recession indicator that examines the economy using a method previously used to analyze the resemblance of human skulls.
• The new indicator comes from researchers at State Street Associates and MIT’s Sloan School of Management who applied the principle of Mahalanobis distance to create a predictor of economic booms and recessions they call the KKT Index of the Business Cycle.
• Going back to 1916, the KKT Index has risen “leading up to every recession so that the combination of its trajectory and level provides a reliable indicator of the likelihood of recession,” the study finds.

The Rockets Are Done With Half-Measures

• Be flexible.
• Don’t have a narrow mind of thought.
• Double down on what works.
• See a vision all the way through.

Across the Globe, Urban Sprawl Is Spreading

• Satellite images dating back to 1975 allow researchers to map how millions of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends have proliferated in street networks worldwide.
• A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences charts a worrying global shift towards more-sprawling and less-hooked-up street networks over time.
• A McGill University economist, examined 28.6 million miles of streets across every continent, using public data from OpenStreetMap as well as historic satellite imagery.
• They built an algorithm to identify various characteristics of connectivity, such as the number of cul-de-sacs, the length of unbroken street links, and how long it takes to walk to key destinations.
• There are 10,845,867 dead-ends in the world, at least mapped on OpenStreetMap.
• In their interactive online Global Spawl Map, the bluer the area, the more compact its streets tend to be. The redder, the more sprawling.
  • Cities in Latin America, Japan, South Korea, much of Europe, and North Africa tend to feature more tightly connected streets.
  • While sprawling urban and suburban areas in Southeast Asia,
  • the United States, and the U.K. have looser grids and more cut-off segments.
• “If you build a disconnected neighborhood, you’re transit-proofing that neighborhood for the next century,” said Millard-Ball.