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In a world where innovation drives success, the most valuable asset a company can secure is exceptional people. Great talent is the common denominator across all successful companies. This is particularly true in the investment industry, and always true for hedge funds. Each hedge fund is essentially a team of people betting that they have the smarts to understand the world better than any of their competitors. When aiming to consistently beat the markets, you need to be the best in the world at what you do. Success is developing an understanding and ultimately an edge that others havent cracked yet. Thats the gamezero-sum, and supercompetitive. As the deputy chief investment officer of a leading hedge fund, I am lucky to see firsthand what it takes to have any chance of being the best. We need everyone on our team to be exceptionally bright, to relentlessly challenge any consensus around them, and to be truly obsessed about what they doall while working in an intense culture of collaboration where everyone challenges each other and seeks to constantly improve. Finding talent like that is extremely tough. Bridgewater has prided itself for decades on attracting the best, but doing so requires evolution in our approach, and looking beyond traditional avenues. Outside the boxand sometimes the classroom Its common for elite companies to look to the most prestigious schools as their primary way of recruiting incoming investment classes. Bridgewater leverages this route, too, as such universities are often the home to many brilliant students. But the fact is, most of the worlds best talent is elsewhere. Many of the most brilliant and innovative thinkers come from diverse backgrounds and educational paths. My own experiences have fueled my commitment to expanding our recruiting horizons. I myself am a college dropout. And before making that choice, I remember how troubled I was by the clear disparities of opportunity I saw around me, when growing up in central Illinois. I would hear of students elsewhere having high school teachers with PhDs and receiving expensive elite standardized test tutoring. By the time I got to high school, I had become an avid participant in online communities developed to help other students, and even published an extensive SAT guide online, which helped freely spread best practices to hundreds of thousands of students across the world. Students like me. The democratization enabled by the internet not only allows for students to access otherwise unattainable resources, but it also opens up key opportunities for companies to identify the best talent. While the possibilities here are endless, Bridgewater has already begun to source candidates through Metaculus, a web-based forecasting platform. With Metaculus, we run prediction competitions, where participants leverage their abilities and grit to make logical, thoughtful predictions about what will happen in the future. This allows us to seamlessly leverage technology to tap into a vast pool of talent that extends far beyond conventional recruiting channels, allowing us to discover talent anywhere in the world. This is a deeply meritocratic approach. Last year, in our first contest, we had participation from students at over 140 schools as well as many noncampus candidates, many of whom Bridgewater had never reached with recruitment efforts before. Fifteen hundred people joined the contest,including 700undergraduate students from across the U.S. While Yale came in 134th place and Harvard finished 138th, Northwestern University topped the standings. But the overall winner was an undergraduate from Grinnell College, a private liberal arts college in Iowa. In addition to the Grinnell student, we interviewed dozens of candidates and ultimately made three internship offers from schools we have not historically recruited from. I personally interviewed those three candidates and can confidently say they were among the most exciting, promising candidates Ive ever met. This competition is only one example of the many ways that new recruitment methods through innovative technologies will level the playing field and highlight those who might otherwise be overlooked. To be best positioned moving forward, leading global companies must consider those who can raise the best ideas, regardless of the background that informs them.
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E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Among the 26 forecasts tracked by ResiClub in its final 2025 home price forecast roundup, the average prediction is a +2.7% increase in U.S. home prices this year. Keep in mind that the above figure is a forecast for nationally aggregated home prices. On a regional and local basis, home price swings can vary greatly from the national figure. For example, on a year-over-year basis, U.S. home prices as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index are up 2.6%, while home prices in the Rochester, New York metro area are up 8.2% and home prices in the Punta Gorda, Florida metro area are down 8.3% during that same timeframe. To better understand how regional home prices may vary in 2025, ResiClub reached out to economists at Zillowwhose forecast of U.S. home prices rising by +2.9% in calendar 2025 aligns with the average modeland economists at Moodyswhose forecast of U.S. home prices falling by -0.4% in 2025 is among the most bearishto gather their metro-level home price forecasts. Lets take a look at the metro-level forecasts. Click here to view an interactive of Zillows 2025 metro area home price forecast. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r
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E-Commerce
At President Donald Trumps inauguration on Monday, Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell took the stage to pray for the incoming administration, peppering his remarks with ham-fisted allusions to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s I Have a Dream speech from some six decades earlier. That same day, Sewella longtime Trump booster who spoke at the Republican National Convention and hosted the candidate at his church in Junetook the logical next step in his quest for conservative influencer superstardom: launch a meme coin and watch rubes throw their hard-earned money at it. I need you to do me a favor right now. I need you to go buy the official Lorenzo Sewell coin, he said in a video posted on X, promising to never sell on the community but rather just earn fees as our token continues to flourish. After reaching a peak market value of $4.5 million, $LORENZOprepare to be shockedlost 93% of its value in a matter of hours, leaving some traders with five- and six-figure losses. I am guessing Sewells congregants will not be hearing a sermon on the cleansing of the Temple anytime soon. Sewell, though, is only doing what everyone in Trumps orbit, including Trump himself, is doing right now: cashing in as quickly and as often as possible. Days before taking the oath of office, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency meme coin, inviting prospective buyers to join his very special Trump Community and urging them to Have Fun! His eponymous meme coin, $TRUMP, should not be confused with $MELANIA, a separate meme coin launched around the same time by his wife, shortly before she once again became first lady of the United States. The terms and conditions onI swear I am not making this upgettrumpmemes.com warn prospective $TRUMP buyers that they could incur substantial losses, and require anyone who buys to first agree to waive their rights to a jury trial or to participate in any hypothetical future class-action lawsuit, which are generally not signs that you are dealing with blue-chip investment opportunities. When asked by reporters, Trump did not do much to inspire additional confidence in the venture: I dont know much about it, other than I launched it, he said, but noted he did understand that it had been very successful. For now, he is right, and especially compared to $LORENZO: At the time of the inauguration, $TRUMP was the worlds third-largest meme coin, behind only Dogecoin and Shina Ibu. As of Thursday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal estimated the $TRUMP market cap at $7 billion and valued Trumps stake at $28 billion, which would be between three and four times his estimated pre-meme coin net worth all by itself. The ethical challenges of a chief executive with the power to shape cryptocurrency policy engaging in a little light eponymous cryptocurrency profiteering do not require a detailed explanation. But this episode is a mere preview of an administration that will function as a glorified cash cube, where everyone in the White House (and everyone who is sufficiently adjacent to it) will have a chance to grab as much as they can hold before the clock runs out. The political dynamics of Trumps second term are unlike anything that anyone alive has experienced: a term-limited president who is interested in ruling but not governing, who ran for office more or less to avoid the possibility of prison time, and whose position on any given issue depends largely on whichever well-dressed man with a firm handshake pitched him last. Unlike most presidents, Trump does not care about setting up his party for future success, because he has never cared about the GOP beyond its utility to his political ambitions. Nor does he care about using a second term to secure his legacy, because in his mind, exacting electoral revenge on Joe Biden was the only thing he needed to do to accomplish that task. For the next four years, then, all Trump really wants is to bask in the glow of winning an election that the haters insisted he would lose, and enjoy the spoils of victory that come with the office. In previous decades, these perks would have consisted largely of lengthier-than-usual stays at Camp David during the high season. In 2025, they include the right to slap your name (and your wifes name) across a digital token and sell it to anyone who will pay for it. The heads of some of the worlds largest and most powerful corporations, too, realize that the regulatory environment might never be as friendly as it is right now, when a president who is as unapologetically profit-driven as they are is calling the shots. Luminaries of the artificial intelligence industry, who understand that their companies will need staggering amounts of cash to have any hope of delivering on their lofty promises, are flocking to Trump, eager to exploit his disinterest in regulating an industry that needs it badly. Billionaires like Metas Mark Zuckerberg, Amazons Jeff Bezos, and Googles Sundar Pichai similarly understand that showing up in person to kiss the ring is both the cheapest and surest way to protect their bloated monopolies from federal oversight. The quarter-billion that Elon Musk spent to back Trumps reelection campaign is pennies on the dollar next to the value of the government contracts for which his companies now enjoy the inside track. A month ago, TikTok was facing a ban in the U.S.; now that Trump is in power, a few well-placed compliments were enough to keep the lights on and the bottom line intact, for the moment. No industry is going as hard in Washington as the crypto industry, which threw a star-studded celebratory ball the night before Trumps inauguration, complete with performances from Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, and Soulja Boy. David Sacks, a member of the Silicon Valley reactionary clique, who Trump recently named as his AI and crypto czar, told cheering attendees that Washingtons reign of terror against crypto had at last come to a close. Yes, some industry leaders have criticized Trump for his $TRUMP stunt, but on the whole they have little to complain about: At the very least, a president who is willing to launch his own meme coin right before moving into the White House is unlikely to be a thorn in te side of the crypto industry anytime soon. The cashing-in presidency slows down onlyand even then, only slightlywhen one persons big score threatens that of another. On Tuesday, Trump announced a new AI joint venture, Stargate, billed as a collaboration among OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle that would invest up to half a trillion dollars in OpenAIs work. (Like many things for which Trump takes credit, Stargate was in the works months before his press conference, and since the money is coming from the private sector, his administration does not have to fund it.) But just hours after Trump declared Stargate a resounding declaration of confidence in Americas potential, Musk, who has been feuding with Altman since breaking with OpenAI in 2018and whose xAI product is a rival to OpenAIs ChatGPTpublicly undercut Trumps grand pronouncements. They dont actually have the money, Musk wrote on X. I have that on good authority. As it turns out, Musks purportedly close relationship with the president started fraying the moment he perceived that as enthusiastically as he might be cashing in these days, one of his Silicon Valley rivals was cashing in even harder. The other tech oligarchs with front-row inauguration seats will probably have their loyalties tested soon, too. Zuckerberg, whose company lobbied aggressively for the TikTok ban and stands to gain billions in ad dollars from its enforcement, cannot be happy about Trumps decision to stay the apps execution; Google and Pichai, whose YouTube Shorts product aspires to compete with TikTok, also must have felt the sting of defeat. Earlier this week, Trump expressed interest in the idea of Musk or Oracles Larry Ellison saving TikTok by acquiring the platform from ByteDance. The more Trump picks winners and losers among those competing for his favor, the less valuable these alliances of convenience with the White House will be. Trump is often described as a grifter, or a con man, or some variation thereof, which is in my view a fair characterization of a man who is unable to cite his favorite Bible verses but nevertheless sells officially licensed Trump Bibles for $59.99 and autographed copies for $1,000, a price that somehow does not include shipping. The difference between his first administration and this one is that this time, many of the business leaders who previously distanced themselves from Trump have figured out that ingratiating themselves is the most lucrative path of least resistance in recent memory. When the president is chasing a payday this hard, no one has to be shy about following his lead.
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E-Commerce
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