Over the past few months, college sports have seen conferences shift, rules change, and a 13–0 team get left out of the playoffs. But a potentially larger shake-up is now in the works.
On Tuesday, NCAA President Charlie Baker proposed a plan to create a new tier within Division I college athletics. The groundbreaking proposal gives participating schools autonomy over name, image, and likeness (NIL) decisions and initiates a “long-overdue conversation” about the existing framework for compensating student-athletes.
Schools would be required to invest a minimum of $30,000/year per athlete for at least half of all eligible student-athletes into an “enhanced educational trust fund,” which by most accounts seems like a regular trust fund.
Student-athletes would be allowed to enter NIL deals directly with their schools rather than a third party.
What it means for the future of college sports
Baker’s proposed new tier pertains to “the highest-resourced colleges and universities,” understood to mean the Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, and ACC, which contain the largest and wealthiest athletic programs in the US. A new subdivision just for those schools could alleviate headaches around transfer limits, scholarships, and, most importantly, NIL rules.
But…some observers say the proposal still doesn’t address the core issue: employment. The NCAA has lobbied for years to prevent college athletes from being named “employees,” but sports law experts see it as a necessary next step in order to give young athletes a share of the revenue they generate.
The NCAA is going through it. It’s embroiled in multiple legal disputes, including an antitrust lawsuit that could require it to pay billions in damages to student-athletes. There are also talks within the industry of a looming Great Split, in which the Power Five conferences (soon to be Power Four) would secede from the NCAA to form their own organization.—CC
1. NVIDIA Fast -10% Correction….All Gains in First Half of Year…..Last 6 Months Only +16%
2. NVDA vs. INTC/AMD
WSJ Dan Gallagher The past year has certainly made it seem that way, though. Nvidia’s sales have more than doubled—and its market value more than tripled—as major tech companies snapped up the company’s chips to capitalize on the explosive interest in generative AI sparked by the launch of the ChatGPT online chatbot a year ago.
9. Nurse Shortages Are Set to Get Even Worse With Mass US Visa Delays
· Visa backlog indefinitely postpones arrival of 10,000 nurses
· Hospitals were already reeling from labor gaps left by Covid
Bloomberg By Katia DmitrievaErica DeBoer, the chief nurse at America’s largest rural health network, thought she could finally offer some relief for her overworked staff and thousands of patients. More than 160 reinforcement nurses were supposed to arrive over the coming months across Sanford Health’s Midwest facilities from as far away as Manila and Lagos, Nigeria.
But now, only 36 are coming — if they’re lucky.The US is in the midst of a visa retrogression, when a surge in demand collides with annual caps, jamming up the processing queue. The delays are particularly bad for the main visa category that hospitals use. Today, government officials are only just starting to work on filings made two years ago — right around the time when many hospitals began hiring foreign nurses and applying for their visas.Experts estimate that at least 10,000 foreign nurses have been delayed indefinitely — a holdup that’s almost certain to worsen an already dire national shortage. After the pandemic led 100,000 nurses to leave their jobs due to burnout or early retirement, US hospitals looked abroad to fill the gap.
“We just can’t take as many patients,” said DeBoer, a 30-year nursing veteran, who plans to hire pricier contract staff in the short-term and push to see more patients online when possible. Foreign workers were a big part of the strategy to fill 1,000 open nurse roles across Sanford Health in the next few years. “We were counting on those international nurses,” she added.
Yamamoto with Kikue Taira, the younger sister of the world’s oldest ever pair of siblings. Nomoto Shunki, LongeviQuest
Yumi Yamamoto has met Japan’s oldest living people, and her great-grandmother died at 115.
She’s noticed a few things Japanese supercentenarians do which might contribute to their longevity.
She shared these aging secrets with Business Insider, including radio gymnastics.
A longevity researcher who verifies the ages of supercentenarians, and whose great-grandmother lived to the age of 116, shared four aging secrets from the longest-living people in Japan.
Yumi Yamamoto, the Japan research president for LongeviQuest, an organization that validates the ages of the world’s oldest people and collects their stories, has this year verified four supercentenarians, which are those who live past the age of 110. This includes Japan’s oldest person, Fusa Tatsumi, who celebrated her 116th birthday in the spring.
She is also the great-granddaughter of Shigeyo Nakachi, who was the second oldest living person in Japan at the time of her death in 2021.
So, Yamamoto knows a thing or two about longevity, particularly what Japanese people with long lives have in common.
LongeviQuest has verified 269 supercentenarians in Japan, including in Okinawa, one of the world’s five Blue Zones, where an unusually high number of people live to over 100. Like in other Blue Zones, super-agers in Japan tend not to eat much meat and spend lots of time with family.
But superagers in Japan also have longevity-boosting habits which are more specific to the country, which Yamamoto shared with Business Insider.
Eating until they are only 80% full
“There’s a saying in Japanese, which says you should only eat until you’re 80% full, so you should leave space at the end of a meal,” Yamamoto said.
The saying, “hara hachi bu,” helps Japanese people to practice mindful eating and mild calorie restriction, which research suggests reduces inflammation and could be beneficial for longevity according to animal studies, although more research is needed.
The average daily calorie intake of someone from the Okinawa Blue Zone, for instance, is only about 1,900, according to Blue Zones, which is less than the 2,000 calories per day that the US Food and Drug Administration recommends.
Do everything in moderation One of the biggest lessons Yamamoto has learned from her chats with supercentenarians is “don’t do things to excess, instead do all things in moderation.”
For example, Kane Taneka, the oldest recorded Japanese person and second oldest person in recorded history, who lived to 119, enjoyed Coca-Cola, but, Yamamoto said, would only have one bottle a day.
“She wasn’t addicted to it, and she wouldn’t drink to excess. This is something that I think is common in Japan. Japanese people eat in a balanced way and they don’t eat or drink to excess,” she said. “And that goes not just for food and drink, but also things like not staying up all night.
Experts agree that enjoying treats in moderation can make healthy eating more sustainable — an approach dubbed the 80/20 rule.
Radio gymnasticsIn Japan, people take part in what’s known as radio gymnastics, Yamamoto said. Since 1928, a radio broadcast has directed listeners in body weight exercises for five minutes a day, and Yamamoto tries to do radio gymnastics in the mornings just like Japan’s super-agers, she said.Research suggests that doing short bursts of intense physical activity could lower therisk of cancer and heart disease, and therefore improve longevity.
And, as BI previously reported, most Blue Zones superagers don’t go to the gym, and instead incorporate movement into their daily lives — whether that’s by walking, taking the stairs, or doing group sports to combine socializing with exercise.
Straight posture Yamamoto said that her great-grandmother was always very “regimented” in her posture, always maintaining a straight back. “One thing I’ve noticed about Japanese supercentenarians and centenarians is that they’re very disciplined and strict on themselves in terms of straight posture,” she said. “As humans, we will tend to hunch over a little bit as we get older, but very elderly Japanese people, even until old age, will maintain a very straight posture,” she said. Research suggests that a good posture can minimize strain on the body, prevent pain, and help keep it functioning correctly.
Janus Henderson In biotech, many stocks trade at even bigger discounts – by some measures, the biggest we have ever seen. After a record drawdown in 2021 and 2022, small- and mid-cap biotech stocks got caught up in the sell-off of long-duration growth assets as 10-year Treasury yields started to rise in 2023. This is not unusual, as we tend to see biotech underperform amid rising rates, with less focus on stock-specific developments. But some market moves seemed extreme as even positive news – such as one company’s announcement of approval for its new therapy for phosphate management in dialysis – would sometimes result in negative returns.
As such, the S&P Biotechnology Industry Index1, a benchmark of large-cap biotech stocks in the S&P 500® Index, trades at a nearly 25% discount to its 30-year average.2 And the number of development stage biotech firms trading below the value of cash on their balance sheets hit a record high in October (Figure 1).Andy Acker, CFADaniel Lyons, PhD, CFA
Figure 1: Biotech at a discount
The number of biotech companies with negative enterprise value* hit a record high in October.
Source: CapitalIQ, as of 3 November 2023. *Enterprise value is defined as the current market capitalization less the net cash on the balance sheet. A negative enterprise value suggests a company trades for less than the value of its cash.
8. The M2 money supply is in the midst of its longest stagnation since World War II.
Business Insider Professor Siegel -The US money supply is flashing a major warning to the US economy, according to Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel. M2 money supply, which includes cash, checking deposits, and other highly liquid assets, bottomed out around $20.7 trillion in April this year amid aggressive rate hikes, according to Federal Reserve data. That’s a 4% drawdown from the prior all-time-record of $21.7 trillion, which was recorded in 2021. Money supply then rebounded through the summer, but has recently returned to its decline, nearing April’s low.
Nasdaq Dorsey Wright-Historical December Performance Observations:
· The SPX has shown a positive return in December over 75% of the time since 1957. However, the index has been positive in the first half of the month just 59% of the time, compared to almost 79% in the second half.
· The RUT has been positive 75% of the time from 1979 forward, but the small-cap index has been positive only 45% of the time in the first half of the month, compared to 84% in the latter half.
· The SPX has seen the second half of the month outperform the first in 67% of instances.
· The RUT has seen the second half of the month outpace the first in 77% of instances.
Practicing these five powerful tenets of leadership will make you unforgettable to employees and irreplaceable to employers.
BY SCOTT MAUTZ, KEYNOTE SPEAKER AND AUTHOR, ‘FIND THE FIRE’ AND ‘MAKE IT MATTER’@SCOTT_MAUTZ
The thing I wanted more than anything “growing up” as a leader was to be unforgettable to employees–for my impact on their performance, growth, happiness, and life. Did I achieve that status for anyone at all? I can only hope so because I know the impact that unforgettable leaders in my life had.
But alas, probably far too few have truly experienced this.
Research shows that 70 percent of employee engagement can be attributed to the managers or leaders, but only 30 percent of employees are engaged at work. So somebody isn’t doing their job.
In conducting research for Find the Fire, I interviewed or surveyed over 1000 employees and 1000 managers and found that almost 60 percent of employees say that the single biggest thing they want from their boss is for him/her to be inspiring; yet only 11 percent answer in the affirmative when asked if their boss is indeed inspiring.
Furthermore, self-awareness on this front isn’t exactly sky high among the leaders themselves. Leaders gave themselves an average score of seven out of ten for how inspirational they thought they were, while their employees scored them on this trait at an average of four out of ten or lower.
Yup, your boss thinks he’s inspirational like in Good Will Hunting, while you daydream of hunting for another job.
As part of my research, I also sought to determine exactly what makes a leader special; worthy of the status of “the best boss I’ve ever had”. Interestingly, five themes clearly stood out. And they weren’t all touchy-feely in nature but instead mixed things that spoke to delivering a great workplace and great results. Strive to ingrain these five habits and standout as a leader that stands the test of time.
1. Create meaning.
Understand that meaning is what motivates employees in a manner that sustains. Foster meaning through actions such as being clear on the organization’s purpose, encouraging each employee to define the legacy they want to leave behind, and by granting large swaths of autonomy. You also create meaning for employees when you invest in their personal growth and development and help foster their sense of competence and self-esteem.
You can help your employees become better versions of themselves and in so doing become a better version of yourself.
2. Consciously care.
I never said this stuff was rocket-science. And yet over two-thirds of employees say that their boss does not genuinely care about them.
This may be the lowest hanging fruit opportunity on this list. Visibly exude caring, compassion, and concern for employees. Thoughtfully administer rewards and recognition (tailoring to employee preferences for how they like to be rewarded), ensure employees have robust personal growth and development plans, and unswervingly show respect.
3. Decide and communicate the decisions.
Nothing is more crippling to an organization than a leader who can’t or won’t just make the call. Timelines extend unmercifully, costs skyrocket, and parallel paths linger and burn everyone out.
Organizational clarity starts with a leader who not only decides but also invests the time to over-communicate decisions (and the “why” behind those decisions).
As a leader, you can decide to just decide and better yet, enroll key stakeholders in those decisions along the way. People need to weigh before they can buy in, after all. There’s nothing wrong with healthy debate along the way by the way, but then after the debate, it’s time to decide, commit, and communicate the decision.
4. Set a vision and connect the dots.
It’s vital that once-in-a-career leaders set a compelling, inspiring vision that focuses employees and encourages the expenditure of their discretionary energy. It should be a vision grounded in strategic objectives and the values of the company.
When you set such a vision, employees show up with conviction and are passionate about building something together that makes a difference in something that matters. In the absence of a compelling vision, employees can flounder. Think about yourself and what it’s like to work in a place that has no clear, inspiring vision–you feel rudderless.
It’s just as important that the vision is then consistently communicated and that the leader helps each employee understand what their unique role is in delivering the vision.
5. Practice “relaxed intensity.”
This means having a very intentional balance of the seriousness and commitment it takes to win with the camaraderie and fun it takes to win on a sustained basis.
As a leader, you can role-model relaxed intensity by visibly having fun at work and being authentic and approachable while at the same time having a fierce desire to win, beat the competition, surpass goals, and continually improve.
You certainly don’t want to be too much of one or the other. I’ve been in organizations that were all intensity and no fun as well as places that were all fun but didn’t have enough underlying drive to succeed. Not good.
Being thought of as a once-in-a-career leader is a high bar to clear. So set a clear path for building these habits into your daily leadership routine.
@callumthomas Next Year: As we’re soon headed into election year it’s worth highlighting an interesting stat — returns historically were positive 83% of the time during presidential election years (and 4 out of the past 24 election years were negative, i.e. 17%). Again, the odds are with you, but remember it’s a statistical observation of the past… and there is nothing to preclude 2024 becoming the 5th. But still, interesting.
2. REITS +18% Off Lows
VNQ Vanguard REIT closes above 200-day moving average
3. MEME Stocks Back in the Mix
GS Meme basket up double the QQQ in November.
4. Best Performers in November.
Bespoke Investment Group Below are the 30 stocks that rose the most in November. For each name, we also include its market cap, its year-to-date total return, its distance from its 52-week high, and short interest as a percentage of float. As shown, buy-now-pay-later company Affirm (AFRM) was up the most in November with a huge gain of 95.4%, followed by streaming company Roku (ROKU), crypto-trading platform Coinbase (COIN), and digital payments company Block (SQ). Are we back in late 2020/early 2021??
BloombergSunil Jagtiani and Suvashree Ghosh The crypto industry is also awaiting the outcome of applications from the likes of BlackRock Inc. to start the first US spot Bitcoin ETFs. Bloomberg Intelligence expects a batch of these products to win Securities & Exchange Commission approval by January.
9. ‘We’re killing the youth of America’: calls grow for crackdown on US gambling
Worries that gambling addiction has spiked in the US as legal sports betting booms have led to calls for increased regulationCallum Jones in New York
The United States is heading into a “quagmire, if not crisis” of gambling addiction among young people, according to counselors and clinicians – prompting calls for a regulatory crackdown.
Treatment clinics are grappling with an influx of patients in their teens and early 20s and helplines are reporting record levels of calls.
“There’s a lot of kids that are gambling,” said Felicia Grondin, executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey.
Ironically, New Jersey was the state that led the charge for the legalization of sports betting and, in 2018, successfully convinced the supreme court to overturn a decades-old federal law that prohibited the state from legalizing sports betting.
Requests for support through New Jersey’s helpline more than doubled over the ensuing years, as the legal market ballooned. Hundreds of calls from concerned relatives each year have heightened fears in the state that problem gambling is sweeping through a new generation. It is not unique.
“Calls to gambling helplines in most states in America are up, by sheer numbers,” said Timothy Fong, co-director of the gambling studies program at UCLA. “More and more younger clients” – aged 25 and under – are seeking treatment, he added.
Arnie Wexler, a counselor, has not seen anything like this before. “We’re killing the youth of America. It’s gotten crazy. Nobody cares,” he said.
Gambling gets younger
Placing a bet in the US has never been easier. Access to legal gambling, once confined to casinos and racetracks, now sits in millions of pockets across the country. Smartphones “made all avenues available to all people”, said Brad Ruderman, of the Beit T’Shuvah treatment center in Los Angeles, California. “This is the first generation where this is normal.”
While you are required to be 21 to bet on sports in most states in which it is legal, or 18 to take part in fantasy contests in much of the US, underage activity is a cause of mounting unease. When Keith Whyte, executive director at the National Council on Problem Gambling, asked a room of 40 17-year-old boys in Virginia earlier this year how many had a sports betting app on their phone, 36 hands rose.
The US is now headed into more of a gambling addiction quagmire, if not crisis
In memory of one of my heroes, Charlie Munger, who passed away this week.
1. “I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time.”
— Charlie Munger
2. “You should never, when faced with one unbelievable tragedy, let one tragedy increase into two or three because of a failure of will.”
— Charlie Munger
3. “Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Systematically you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. Nevertheless, you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.”
— Charlie Munger
4. “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”
— Charlie Munger
5. “Take a simple idea, and take it seriously.”
— Charlie Munger
6. “I see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help.”
— Charlie Munger
7. “I didn’t get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.”
— Charlie Munger
8. “I want to think about things where I have an advantage over others. I don’t want to play a game where people have an advantage over me. I don’t play in a game where other people are wise and I am stupid. I look for a game where I am wise, and they are stupid. And believe me, it works better. God bless our stupid competitors. They make us rich.”
— Charlie Munger
9. “I am not smart enough to make decisions with no time to think. I make actual decisions very rapidly, but that’s because I have spent so much time preparing ourselves by quietly reading.”
3. AGG Bond Index on Track for Best Month Since 1980s
Dave Lutz Jones Trading The Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate bond index is up 4.8% in price this month. That puts the widely tracked index on course for its best month since the 1980s, according to FactSet data, after a sharp unwinding of rate-hike expectations sent investors on a bond-buying spree.
4. Massive Flows Helped Drive Down Yields Increase Return.
A bond exchange-traded fund crossed $100 billion for the first time since such products launched over two decades ago.
A $14 million inflow Wednesday pushed assets in the Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF (ticker BND) above $100 billion for the first time ever, data compiled by Bloomberg show. BND has absorbed $15.6 billion so far this year.
Torsten Slok, Ph.D. Apollo-Since the Fed started raising rates, small businesses have seen a trend decline in earnings and sales, see chart below. This is what the textbook would have predicted. Higher costs of capital weigh on small cap companies with high leverage, low coverage ratios, and weak or no earnings. With the Fed keeping rates high at least until the middle of 2024, we should expect these trends to continue.
10. This Is Your Brain on Junk Food
Food for Thought: Ultra-processed foods:
Psychology Today Diet influences mood and cognition, for better or for worse. Scott C. Anderson
KEY POINTS
Junk food is low on fiber, disrupting the gut microbiome.
A dysbiotic gut can lead to inflammation.
You can help fix gut-brain problems by reducing processed food and eating fiber-filled vegetables instead.
Many highly processed foods are potentially dangerous, partly because they disregard the fate of gut microbes. It is pure folly to ignore those microbes, especially since they are so crucial to our physical and mental health. How important?
A new study from Tufts University, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, says that better diets “could avert approximately 1.6 million hospitalizations and result in an estimated net savings of $13.6 billion in health care costs in the first year alone.”
The microbes in your gut differ from mine, and they vary daily. The diversity of gut microbes gives rise to an astonishing number of genes, outnumbering our genes by a factor of 100.
Good bacteria produce nourishing substances that feed and heal the cells lining your gut. If you don’t support those good bacteria, your gut cells may become hungry and disease-prone. Your gut may become leaky enough to allow bacteria and toxins to pass through.
Once bacteria breach the gut lining, the heart will pump them to every organ in your body, including your brain. This can lead to depression, anxiety, paranoia, psychosis, cognitive difficulties, and dementia.
What Is Processed Food? The term “processed” as applied to food can be confusing. A lot of processed foods are perfectly healthy. Shelled nuts, for instance, are processed to remove an inedible shell.
Other foods are so highly processed that it’s difficult to identify the source material. Think of cheese puffs, twinkies, or vegan burgers. Delicious, yes, but what are they made of?
These foodstuffs can be problematic since one of the first steps in processing them is to remove the fiber. After all, the thinking goes, fiber is indigestible and makes products brown. Take the fiber out, and you have beautiful white foods that are easy to color any way you wish.
But fiber, an important macronutrient, is meant for your gut microbes, not you. That single elimination may be the worst thing that has happened to our diet over the last 60 years. Our gut microbes are changing composition, and some species are even becoming extinct.
There’s more: Processed foods often contain emulsifiers, which improve texture, extend shelf life, and keep ingredients mixed. Some of them, like carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate 80, can significantly impact intestinal microbiota and lead to gut inflammation. Modern diets are failing us.
Major Macronutrients
There are thousands of nutrients in food that are good for you, but we can classify them into four broad categories. Let’s imagine a food called EquiStuff made with equal amounts of each macronutrient:
Fiber: 25 percent
Fat: 25 percent
Protein: 25 percent
Carbs: 25 percent
Now take out the fiber to improve taste and texture:
Fat: 33 percent
Protein: 33 percent
Carbs: 33 percent
Notice what just happened. By the magic of math, the fat and carb content went from 25 percent of the food to 33 percent. Let’s keep going and take the fat out of EquiStuff. Now we have:
Protein: 50 percent
Carbs: 50 percent
Again, we didn’t set out to do this, but the carbs in EquiStuff have gone from 25 percent to 50 percent. By taking out two macronutrients, we doubled the carbs.
Thus, you don’t need to add carbs like sugar to make something sweeter. Remove the fat and fiber, and the job is done for you. But sadly, sugar is not good for a balanced gut microbiome.
Affects to Your Brain-Your diet and intestines have a clear connection, but how does that affect your brain?
Amazingly, bacteria in your gut can produce neurotransmitters, including dopamine and serotonin. These can communicate with your brain via the vagus nerve.
These neurotransmitters are the same ones targeted by psychoactive drugs, so these microbes may be just as effective as Prozac but without the side effects.
On the downside, a leaky gut caused by sugar-pumped pathogens can lead to systemic inflammation. Over time, that can adversely affect our cognition and mood.
There are several more channels of communication between the gut and the brain, but these two are extremely important from a dietary point of view.
What You Can Do-The good news is that you can fix gut-brain problems by cutting back on processed food and replacing it with fiber-filled veggies, like onions, broccoli, artichokes, and beans. Good fiber and beneficial bacteria sources can be found in ferments like sauerkraut, kimchee, kefir, and yogurt. If you can’t flip the script, try probiotic or prebiotic fiber supplements to give you a concentrated dose of the good stuff.
This isn’t an all-or-none life change. But every step you take toward increasing fiber in your diet is a step toward rejuvenating your gut bacteria. Your microbes will make you feel better in return.
We can’t change the genes we were born with, but we can change our microbial genes. That provides a powerful lever to lift our health and our mood.
