Topley’s Top 10 – March 29, 2022

1. U.S. Treasury Yield Breaking Above Downtrend Going Back to Mid-1980’s

Jim Reid Deutsche Bank

Today’s chart is one I’ve seen many times over the last several years, showing the downward trend channel in 10yr US Treasury yields since the mid-1980s.

As we breach the top of the trend line, will we be able to officially retire it soon or will we bounce back down into the long-term channel?

Clearly such a channel can’t go on forever unless you’re of the opinion that we will consistently see negative nominal US yields in the latter part of this decade. So the near 40-year trendline will almost certainly have to end in the next few years regardless, but the recent spike in yields raises the prospect of it doing so imminently.

For this, much will depend on inflation and the Fed’s reaction to it. As I wrote in my EMR this morning, given just how far the Fed is behind the curve it’s fair to say that if the post-GFC cycle could be erased from people’s memory banks, then I think markets might be pricing 300-400bps of hikes this year. However the fact that the last decade was so moribund from an activity and inflation point of view means that markets still refuse to believe the Fed can get very far in this cycle. The market is collectively anchored to the trends of the last cycle. However remember that before the FOMC 9 months ago in June 2021 the Fed and the market were hardly pricing in any rate moves until 2024, and only 3 hikes for 2022 as recently as the start of this year. Overall there has been a constant misunderstanding of this cycle which is totally different to the last. Clearly this view is changing but the c.240bps of total hikes now priced in for 2022 still isn’t a huge year of tightening historically.


2. Two Year Treasury Yields Surge….5s to 30s Invert

Bloomberg-Yields on two-year Treasuries surged as much as 14 basis points to 2.41% to lead increases across the curve, as traders priced in two full percentage points of Fed increases over the remainder of this year. Yields on five-year notes rose above those on 30-year bonds, suggesting some investors anticipate an economic downturn and perhaps even a recession.

Global Bond Rout Deepens on Fear Rate Hikes Will Stoke Recession-By

Anchalee Worrachate and

Garfield Clinton Reynolds

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-27/global-bond-rout-sends-australian-yields-to-highest-since-2014?srnd=premium&sref=GGda9y2L


3. As Rates Rise…U.S. Dollar Gets Stronger..

www.stockcharts.com


4. 5 Years in a Row and 7 of Last 10 Years…Venture Capital Leads Returns Among Alternative Investments


5. Record Quarter for Commodities

Commodities: It’s been quite a quarter for commodities.

Source: BofA Global Research; @MikeZaccardi

From the Daily Shot Blog https://dailyshotbrief.com/the-daily-shot-brief-march-28th-2022/


6. S&P Rolling One-Year Frequency of Returns

From Michael Batnick Irrelevant Investor Blog

https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2022/03/28/talk-your-book-protecting-the-downside/


7. Emerging Market Bonds Worst Start in 26 Years

www.stockcharts.com


8. Streaming vs. Cable

Barrons

Barrons By

Nicholas Jasinski  https://www.barrons.com/articles/netflix-stock-disney-paramount-streaming-51648171934?mod=past_editions


9. Top Home Price Gains by State

From The  Campbell Real Estate Timing Letter


10. I leave 30% of my day unscheduled, and it’s done wonders for my creativity and focus. Here’s how it works.

  • Michael Thompson is a writer and leadership and communication strategist.
  • He blocks off two hours each day to take a walk, do a hobby, or network with peers. 
  • Leaving 30% of his workday unscheduled has improved his creativity and focus, he says.

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For decades, Dan Sullivan, founder of popular business coaching program “The Strategic Coach,” says he’s taken off 155 days a year entirely from work

On the 210 days he does work, he says his main strategy to stay focused on the right tasks is to leave 30% of his day unscheduled. Creating this window each day allows time to focus on growth through new opportunities and ideas, rather than spending 100% of your day on your current workload, Sullivan says.

When I first came across this advice three years ago, like a lot of things that sound nice in principle, I thought it wasn’t possible. At the time, my wife was commuting to her office an hour away from home and I was struggling to juggle our two young kids with my own work. I thought for sure leaving roughly two hours unscheduled would hamper my productivity, but I was wrong.

By sticking to Sullivan’s advice and scheduling my free time first, within three months I’d made the turn from an aspiring creative to a decently paid one, despite being a relative newbie to the online writing and coaching world. Here’s what following the 30% rule helps me accomplish.

1. I can create more ‘Eureka’ moments

It’s not a coincidence that a lot of people come up with their best ideas outside of the office. More often than not, the key to getting my ideas to connect is giving them room to breathe. Since adopting the 30% rule, every day from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. I shut down my computer and do just that. I use this window to get outside of the house for a midday walk or run, spend time studying Spanish, go grocery shopping, or simply allow myself to zone out.

By creating this space, I’ve been able to come up with a steady stream of ideas for bi-weekly articles over the last three years. I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought of the perfect one-liner for a client’s project or untied a mental knot while out for a midday walk. When I get back to work at 2 p.m., I feel refreshed and ready to bring the same level of focus to my afternoons as I do my mornings.

2.  I have time to tend to my network

In addition to getting out of the house, I also use this unscheduled time to reach out to new people or catch up with old friends. This may sound basic, but it saved me financially when COVID-19 came on the scene. Like a lot of people, I lost half of my work contracts overnight. But thanks to my proactive habit of reaching out to people and maintaining good connections, people in my network passed along new opportunities which helped me replace what was canceled.

Prior to implementing the 30% rule, I had a tendency to view networking as an “if time allows” activity. Proactively carving out time to stay in contact with people opened my eyes very quickly to the reality that strong networks are much easier to maintain when done consistently. We all know the importance of networking — often, the opportunities we’re given are a direct reflection of the company we keep.

It doesn’t have to be a constant back and forth — maintaining your network can be as simple as sending a quick email or leaving a short voicemail letting someone know you’re thinking about them.

3. I’ve improved my ability to prioritize

Having a million things running through your mind is the fastest way to sabotage your primary goals.

Treating my unscheduled time as close to non-negotiable as possible — combined with the time-restraint strategy of less time to work — forced me to really think about which tasks truly move my work forward and helped me weed out those that don’t.

One of the ways I do this is by following Sullivan’s advice of capping my daily to-do list at three tasks. Every evening, before wrapping up work, I take 10 minutes to map out my to-dos for the following day and then I write them down on individual note cards. This allows me to start each morning with clarity. Seeing the stack of completed tasks also reminds me that even on days when I feel like I’m not doing enough, I absolutely am.

How to get the 30% rule to work for you

The key to making the 30% rule work is breaking out your calendar at the end of each week  and proactively scheduling time for yourself for the upcoming week first — before getting bombarded with requests from other people.

I’m at my best when working in three-hour time blocks and for the entirety of 2022, I have a two-hour break in the middle of the day written into my old-school calendar above my desk so it’s visible. If you work better in shorter time blocks, try carving out four 30-minute increments of space throughout your day and use it to change up your environment as much as possible by moving to a different room to work on a hobby, taking a walk outside, etc.

Following the 30% rule isn’t always easy —  there are days of course when either my kids or client deadlines bite into this time. But that’s the best part — since I already built “open” time into my schedule, I don’t have to stress or work late if I occasionally get thrown off course.

If you’re an entrepreneur or you’re working remotely and don’t have to be glued to your PC all day, give the 30% rule a shot. If you’re back in the office and working a 9-to-5, propose it to your manager or team — having schedule flexibility has been shown to increase job satisfaction and reduce work-related stress.

It took me a long time to learn that always being ‘on’ truly is the enemy of productivity. Now that I’ve experienced the benefits of scheduling downtime first, the idea of working more to accomplish less isn’t nearly as enticing as stepping away to allow the dots to better connect.

Michael Thompson is a communication strategist who assists individuals and organizations to grow their influence in the new world through the power of words. To learn more about his work, visit here and receive a free 12-step guide to become a more memorable storyteller and persuasive writer.

https://www.businessinsider.com/30-rule-unscheduled-time-improve-creativity-focus-at-work-2022-3

Topley’s Top 10 – March 28, 2022

1. Commodities Historical vs. S&P

Capital Group

https://www.capitalgroup.com/advisor/insights/articles/is-spike-commodity-prices-sustainable.html?sfid=1988901890&cid=80693875&et_cid=80693875&cgsrc=SFMC&alias=D-btn-LP-6-A1cta-Advisor


2. Where to Allocate in Case of Stagflation

Living with Stagflation: So you’ve decided to move on with your life and just “live with stagflation”. Here’s what history says about where to allocate…(n.b. past performance does not necessarily = future, etc)

Source: @AndreasSteno

From Callum Thomas Topdown Charts

https://www.topdowncharts.com/chartstorm


3. Household Allocation to Equities Historically Points to Tops in S&P

From Steve Blumenthal CMG Wealth   https://www.cmgwealth.com/ri-category/on-my-radar/


4. Industrial Sector Margins ..Rails Highest

(20) Stef ⚡️ (@dyankov91) / Twitter


5. Russia 35% of World Uranium


6. Country Performance Since Covid Low

https://www.bespokepremium.com/interactive/posts/think-big-blog/country-performance-since-covid-low


7. RV Shipment Data Highest Ever

Zerohedge-New RV shipment data from the RV Industry Association’s (RVIA) February 2022 survey of manufacturers revealed demand for this time of year is at some of the highest levels ever.

RVIA said total RV shipments last month topped 53,722 units, an increase of 11.3% compared to the 48,286 units shipped during the same month last year. RV shipments jumped 13.6% through February versus the same point last year with 107,012 wholesale shipments.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/rv-shipments-soar-record-time-year


8. Nearly half the country requires no permit to carry a concealed weapon — and it’s a growing trend

Source: Washington Post From Barry Ritholtz Blog https://ritholtz.com/2022/03/sunday-reads-266/


9. Contemporary Art Has Outperformed Stocks for 25 Years

In the 993 days since starting this newsletter, we’ve seen thousands of charts about investing. But few struck us like this one above.

When you see numbers like this, it’s easy to see why billionaires and hedge fund managers battle for paintings in auction houses across the globe.

Going once, going twice…

The heavyweights might duke it out for $100 million+ pieces, but you can harness the compounding magic of art with Masterworks for much less. This revolutionary platform lets you invest in art by legends like Picasso, Warhol, and Rothko—even if your last name isn’t Bezos.

Here’s their track record since 2019:

  • George Condo’s “Staring into Space”: +31.7% net IRR (2020-22)
  • Banksy’s “Mona Lisa”: +32% net IRR (2019-20)
  • Albert Oehlen’s “Doppelbild”: +33.8% net IRR (2020-21)

No wonder JP Morgan called art a “powerful financial asset.” With over 375,000 investors already signed up, demand is high — but Chartr Subscribers skip the waitlist.*

www.chartr.com


10. How to Become Truly Confident

By Jordan Harbinger | October 13, 2020 | 

Confidence is one of those game-changing qualities—like rapport, empathy and courage—that is both incredibly valuable and highly elusive. As soon as we “try” to be confident, we’ve already failed. As soon as we “act” more confident, we’re already pretending. Telling someone to “be more confident” is like telling someone to be taller. That’d be nice, but how?

The answer to that question requires a new approach to confidence—one that goes beyond the “fake it till you make it!” mentality, and moves toward something more authentic, more grounded and more holistic.

We need to get clear on what true confidence really looks like, so we can understand how it works, how to cultivate it and how to rediscover it when it wanes.

Most importantly, we need to approach confidence not as a fixed quality to be attained, but as a dynamic process to be engaged in throughout our lives—a process my team and I have been developing for more than 15 years, most recently through our live-training company, Six-Minute Networking.

So let’s start at the beginning and get a good handle on what confidence really is.

What Is Confidence, Exactly?

We might not always have a firm grasp of textbook confidence, but we know it when we see it. We know it because we feel it, and we know what it feels like to be around it. Which is one reason the definition of confidence can be so hard to pin down. Confidence is really an experience—both of ourselves and of other people.

We also know when we don’t feel it. In the presence of an insecure person—or, even more telling, a person pretending to be confident—we not only notice their lack of confidence, but also their shaky attempts to compensate for it.

Interestingly, when we’re in the company of an unconfident person, we often tend to feel unconfident ourselves. We struggle to organically connect, we begin second-guessing our words and choices, and we notice ourselves feeling uneasy, uncertain and unengaged.

Which is pretty fascinating if you think about it.

Confidence—and a lack of it—is one of those rare characteristics that is infectious. Lead with true confidence, and you’ll inspire it in other people. Betray a lack of confidence, however, and you’ll expose a similar lack in them. If you’ve ever spent time with a confident stranger at a cocktail party, or tried to bond with an insecure manager in a job interview, then you know how radically different these two qualities can make you feel.

But as we know, confidence is also a quality that can be affected, projected or faked. Deep insecurity can masquerade as confidence, as we often see with embattled politicians and troubled CEOs, struggling loved ones and nervous first dates. And experts continue to tell us that confidence can be “hacked,” “acquired” and “learned” if we just commit to talking, acting or looking a certain way.

Our confidence can also appear quite strong, only to crumble in the face of struggle, criticism or failure. In those moments, it seems like confidence is nothing more than a fleeting feeling, a passing belief in our own power, a temporary reprieve between periods of self-doubt.

So what is true confidence, really?

To put it simply, true confidence is a feeling of self-assurance that is grounded in an authentic experience of our own ability, perspective and sufficiency.

It’s a stable connection to the fact that we can do what we want to do, feel how we want to feel, and be who we want to be in this world.

It’s also a sense that we are enough—that we aren’t lacking in some fundamental sense that prevents us from navigating the world in a healthy, positive, productive way.

All of which, of course, are qualities we aspire to have. Confidence is an integral part of human psychology. With it, we feel engaged, purposeful, inspired. Without it, we feel rudderless, wary, fearful. Consciously or unconsciously, we know how important confidence really is.

Still, you probably know relatively unconfident people who manage to get ahead in life. You might believe that your own confidence is secondary to the quality of your work, your relationships and your overall personality. You might even suspect that confidence isn’t a quality to be trusted, given that it can be affected, inherited or “turned on” at a moment’s notice.

So it’s worth asking…

Why Does Confidence Matter?

It’s an excellent question. And while it might seem painfully obvious to those who are already interested in working at it, confidence actually does matter—for four key reasons.

1. Confidence is an amplifier of quality and success.

Contrary to the view of many self-help experts, confidence is not a proxy for quality, depth or character. It should not be an end in and of itself, and it will never compensate for good old-fashioned hard work. Even the most confident people need to be confident about something—themselves, their work, their identities—and confidence divorced from content will always fall apart sooner or later.

Instead, we think about true confidence as an essential part of our character and work.

It’s a layer to everything we do, say and put out into the world, from our work to our relationships, our opinions to our decisions. Confidence acts as fuel on the fire of whatever we touch. We still need a good fire—we will always need to do the work—but without the fuel, the fire can only grow so large. Look at any massive and consistent success—from Jay-Z to the iPad, Honey Nut Cheerios to Tesla, Michael Jordan to Walmart—and you’ll find a sense of confidence at its core.

Interestingly, many high performers resist this view of confidence. They believe that if their work is strong enough, if their skills are advanced enough, or if their personalities are likable enough, they won’t need confidence. They believe, in other words, that their strengths will speak for themselves. Which is true, of course. The question is: how well?

Ironically, it’s some of the most talented people in the world who dismiss the importance of confidence. In my experience—based on hundreds of interviews with top performers and years of coaching clients, corporations and the military—it’s precisely their talent that makes them so skeptical. How impressive would their work really be if it depended on something as vague as self-assurance? How would they feel about their talent if their success ultimately depended on personality?

These are worrying questions for people who have been trained their whole lives to value their skills and performance above all else.

But it’s not the case that these people completely lack confidence. What they have is contextual confidence. Within the narrow context of their specialty or world—coding, writing, statistical analysis, business development, team meetings—they actually do enjoy a certain degree of confidence. It’s a critical type of confidence that comes with time, dedication and expertise.

Outside of that context, however, they waver. They don’t have the kind of generalized confidence that infuses everything they do, in and around their work: the way they present their deliverables, the way they engage with different types of colleagues and partners, the way they navigate their careers in the bigger picture, and so on.

That lack of generalized confidence tends to make them double down on the areas in which they do feel confident. And so they remain in their secure confidence bubbles, focusing on the silos and tasks and roles where they feel most competent, which guarantees that they won’t tackle new skills and situations that would expose their lack of generalized confidence.

Nate, an immensely talented network architect at a cloud security company, recently attended our live training program. After years of exceptional work with little recognition and no major promotions, he decided it was finally time to seek some additional help.

Once he completed the training on relationship building, self-analysis and practical exercises, he told me why he had been dreading the process so much. He knew, subconsciously, that he had a profound weakness in his general confidence and that the better he became in his technical role, the less he wanted to work through any perceived deficiencies in his personality.

But the transformation was worth it. He entered the program as a quiet, self-effacing, generally avoidant personality with a gift for engineering. He left the program as an excited, gregarious, curious personality with a demonstrable passion for it.

A few months later, I received an email from Nate with a life update. After six weeks back at the office, his managers began visibly responding to his work in team meetings. Though it was always strong, they suddenly seemed to take notice of his contributions—no doubt because of the way he was now presenting it. Soon after, his colleagues also mentioned a change—not just in his technical role, but in his personal style, his excitement and his approachability. He was promoted to manager of his team ahead of a major rollout, which also helped secure two other job offers from competing companies.

As if by magic, Nate’s professional life had completely turned around. But it wasn’t magic. Just a couple months earlier, he had plateaued professionally by focusing exclusively on his deliverables. The moment he began working on himself, he created the exciting opportunities he always wanted. He had invested in confidence, which amplified his excellent work.

Stories like Nate’s are a reminder that confidence can be consciously cultivated. More importantly, they’re evidence that confidence matters. And it matters most when it’s developed in conjunction with hard work and meaningful substance.

Whether we like it or not, the quality of our work alone will never get us where we want to go. But when that quality links up with true confidence, our work takes on a new caliber and begins to resonate with people in a much more powerful way.

2. Confidence is essential to influence and leadership.

As we just saw, the success of our professional lives depends on both what we do and how we do it.

What we do is a matter of technical skill. How we do it is a function of confidence.

One of the most important aspects of that how is our degree of influence and the quality of our leadership. The impact we have on our work products, the control we exert in our organizations and the influence we have on our partners all require true confidence. These confidence-based skills are what separate technicians from managers, employees from leaders, and artisans from artists.

Selby, a producer at a major radio station, recently came to our program to work specifically on these skills. As she told us on her first day, she was a deeply shy person who was remarkable at her job. She spent her days booking celebrity guests, only to experience crippling anxiety when they arrived at the station. She loved her colleagues, but was devastated to learn that they regularly farmed out work to her knowing that she was incapable of saying no. And she hadn’t risen up through the ranks of the station, despite four years of consistently great work behind the scenes.

After graduating from the program, Selby went back to work. She continued the exercises we gave her and used them to improve her interactions with the high-profile people she met. With a handle on her fear of setting boundaries, she began telling her colleagues what she would and wouldn’t do and watched as the station’s productivity skyrocketed. As a result of these (and many other) tools and mindsets, she was promoted to manager of the entire station six months later. A year after that, she was given her own show.

The difference in Selby’s performance was not a function of talent or discipline. She didn’t become smarter, more skilled or more committed. She became connected to her confidence. And that confidence opened a window into a suite of skills—from delegation to politics, leadership to conversational banter—that had eluded her for years.

3. Confidence isn’t just about style. It’s also about substance.

Selby’s story is also a reminder that confidence and substance are intimately connected. While a lack of confidence in a typical person is always challenging, a lack of confidence in a truly capable person can be crippling.

Why?

Because an incongruence between the quality of your work and your level of confidence can actually amplify the deficiency.

Your work might perform well, but by succeeding, it will end up highlighting your insecurity even further. At the same time, your partners and colleagues will expect a degree of confidence that reflects how strong your work is and will be all the more disappointed when they find it missing.

Once people sense that gap, they’ll often begin to doubt whether the work is as strong as it first seemed. That, in turn, can make you doubt your judgment about your own work, creating a dangerous feedback loop. Insecurity will give rise to new feelings of doubt, fear and confusion, which will eventually creep into your choices. Your strong contextual confidence will begin to erode, and your weaker generalized confidence will start to infect it.

So these two types of confidence are actually closely related. As much as we want to believe otherwise, we can’t succeed without having both types of confidence, which are essential to creating and capitalizing on your work.

4. Confidence protects us.

In an increasingly complex and competitive world, confidence is one of the greatest weapons we can develop. At the same time, a lack of confidence is also one of our greatest vulnerabilities because it broadcasts to the world how susceptible we really are.

As we’re about to explore in more depth, confidence manifests in a number of highly visible ways: our body language, vocal tonality, verbal cues and micro-decisions. No matter how hard we try, we can’t really hide how we feel about ourselves. We broadcast our weaknesses wherever we go.

We wear our lack of confidence like a badge, and that badge unconsciously tells the world how to treat us.

Unfortunately, there will always be a segment of the population ready to capitalize on those weaknesses. In some cases, that vulnerability will invite trouble in relatively minor ways: a shifty cab driver offering us a ride off the meter, a gifted insurance salesman upselling us to a higher premium, a narcissistic friend dominating our time and energy. In other cases, that weakness will get us into deeper trouble: a predatory lender locking us into a dangerous loan, a manipulative family member controlling our happiness and resources, a power-hungry manager exploiting us in the workplace. Of course, the possibilities can get even more troubling.

If you take a moment to think back, you can probably remember a time you were taken advantage of in a moment of low confidence. That wasn’t an accident. It was your degree of confidence at the time that exposed you to that situation, and it was your relationship to your confidence that determined how well you handled it.

The outcome of that experience might have taught you a lesson and increased your confidence in the future. Or it might have confirmed what you subconsciously believe about yourself and left you vulnerable to a similar scenario down the road.

So in addition to enhancing our work and character, confidence also helps protect us, physically and emotionally. That’s why working on it matters so much. We aren’t just talking about style and appearances. We’re talking fundamentally about who we are, how we present ourselves in the world, and how the world will treat us in return.

Now that we have a handle on why confidence matters, let’s explore some practical principles and techniques for achieving it.

How Do I Become More Confident?

As we’ve discussed, confidence is a tough quality to pin down. Because it’s more of a dynamic experience than a static trait, it can be a difficult concept to teach.

In our experience, the best way to build confidence is to isolate the elements that comprise it—the behaviors, characteristics and mindsets that create true self-assurance. Then, we can put those pieces together in a way that creates true, lasting, generalized confidence.

Starting with…

1. Nonverbal communication.

As we just touched upon, confidence is expressed most profoundly through our bodies. No matter how well we speak, the way we feel about ourselves will always manifest in our posture, our gait, our hand movements and our facial features.

And because these cues are nonverbal—bypassing the more intellectual language centers in our brains—other people pick up on them viscerally and quickly. They receive a vivid snapshot of our inner confidence the moment we walk into a room.

If we enter a room standing up straight with our shoulders back, chins up and eyes engaged, then others will viscerally perceive us as confident. If we enter with our shoulders hunched, brows furrowed, and eyes shifty or staring at the floor, then they’ll viscerally perceive us as unconfident (if they notice us at all). And they make this judgment in microseconds—just as we do of them.

That’s why body language is such an important part of strong first impressions. We have to remember that people’s impressions are made when they see us, not when we first interact with them. Since we can’t control when that happens, we can’t just turn our confidence on when we think we need it. We need to internalize and embody it at every moment, so it becomes part of our observable presence wherever we go.

To do that, we recommend the doorway drill, a simple technique that will force you to check your body language whenever you walk through a door. The exercise is simple: Every time you approach a doorway, take a moment to stand up straight, pull your shoulders back, uncross your arms, and look up and ahead. These are the signals of positive body language, and they both reflect and reinforce confidence.

To help form that habit, we often tell our students to place post-it notes at eye level in their doorways at home and in the office. Every time they see a post-it, they remember that it’s a reminder to check their body language. After a week or two, the post-its become unnecessary. The visual cue creates a habit that lives in their bodies, and they automatically begin checking their body language whenever they walk through any doorway out in the world.

While body language might seem superficial—it is, after all, about how confidence appears on the “outside”—it’s actually very profound. Because while confidence informs body language, body language also has a powerful effect on building confidence. If we carry ourselves confidently, we teach our bodies to experience confidence. And the more confident we become, the more we reinforce the behavior to carry ourselves that way out in the world.

This is one of the beauties of body language work: Addressing the symptoms of confidence can actually influence the causes of it.

So commit to strong, positive body language and make a conscious effort to form habits that make your nonverbal communication automatic. Notice the body language that signals confidence in people you meet and consider internalizing those choices in yourself.

Most importantly, notice how your nonverbal communication changes the way you feel in social situations and how it changes the way other people feel about you. You’d be amazed how much of confidence depends on the things we don’t say.

2. Vocal tonality.

After body language, our voice is the most powerful organ of our confidence. Vocal tonality—which includes not just the physical quality of our voice, but our pitch, articulation, syntax, volume and intention—expresses and reinforces our innermost sense of self.

Vocal tonality is notoriously difficult to teach in an article, but we can touch on some key techniques for improving this dimension of confidence so that we can use it to enhance our self-assurance.

Speak in statements, not questions.

While you’re probably no stranger to the high rising terminal—also known as “upspeak,” or the tendency to end sentences with a rising pitch intonation, as if asking a question—you might not know how much of a role intonation plays in our confidence, both perceived and actual.

When we express statements as questions (“Hi, my name is Steven?”; “I’m applying for the content manager role in marketing?”; “I’ve been working here three years?”), we subtly communicate the doubt, uncertainty and informational disparity implied by a question. As a growing body of research now shows, upspeak can significantly diminish our hireabilitycompromise our chances for promotion, and affect the way people perceive our power and authority—which is unfortunate, since many of us adopt it out of politeness and a desire to be understood.

One of the best ways to smooth out the high rising terminal is to do a simple visualization exercise. Imagine a sentence as a hill, rising from the earth, peaking and then sloping back down. When we engage in upspeak, we stop at the top of that hill, leaving ourselves and the audience in a subtle state of uncertainty. As you speak, impose the image of the hill on your sentence and commit to coming back down the other side of the slope. That will help your audience rest in the declarative finish that communicates confidence and further increase your confidence the more you speak.

Articulate and enunciate.

The way we treat our words—literally, as they form in our mouth—is a signal and a function of confidence. To increase our confidence in conversation, we should also commit to articulating and enunciating our words more emphatically. When we do, we communicate confidence to the people around us. We also teach our bodies to become more confident the more we speak.

A helpful exercise here is to take a champagne cork (which is larger than a standard cork), place it in your mouth, and read a passage from a book with strong dramatic flair. Because you’ll be forced to work overtime as the cork resists your efforts, your mouth will become super articulate. On an emotional level, enunciating strongly will force you to commit to your words—to take them more seriously—which is, of course, a hallmark of confidence.

Avoid the use of filler words.

Filler words such as “like,” “um” and “so” also play a major role in confidence. And while we don’t believe you need to remove them entirely in order to be taken seriously—these words can actually make your speech friendlier, more colloquial and more organic if used properly—filler words tend to undermine our authority when they become a crutch.

In many cases, we use filler words to patch silences in conversation. (“So… yeah, I mean, what do think about the new, uh… the new project?”) We often do this because we’re subconsciously afraid that if we hand the reins over to the person we’re speaking with, we’ll lose control of the conversation or be responsible for any gaps. But as we know, confidence means trusting that our words and presence are enough to be compelling. It also means trusting that the other person can and should help carry a conversation. When we remove these types of filler words in conversation, we stop subtly buttressing our unconfident speech, and we signal to the other person that we trust in their confidence, too.

Of course, we also use filler words to qualify our speech. (“Well, I just feel that, like, there’s a better way to, you know, present this, uh, deliverable, so…”) Sometimes we do this strategically, but more often we do this subconsciously, which has a similar effect on our confidence—and the way people perceive it—as upspeak does. In a professional setting, filler words can have major implications in team meetings, salary negotiations and conflict resolution.

A helpful exercise to weed out filler words is to record yourself in conversation. You can use the voice memo app on your phone (or any old-school recording device) to record a meeting or your side of a conversation on the phone. Listen to the recording for a few minutes every day for a week and notice how often filler words creep into your everyday speech.

I then recommend going a step further and exporting the file to an audio editor (Audacity is an excellent free app) and editing out all of the filler words that pop up. While it might seem a bit obsessive, it’s actually one of the greatest ways to analyze your speech. I only noticed my own dependence on filler words after spending hours editing out the “ums” and “so’s” on my podcast, The Jordan Harbinger Show. Once I realized how much of a crutch these words had become, I caught myself before I used them and found my confidence growing exponentially.

With body language and vocal tonality under our belts, let’s turn now to the more profound psychological underpinnings of confidence.

3. Authentic vulnerability.

As much as experts argue that confidence can be affected, that kind of superficial confidence—built on acquired body language, forced vocal tonality, rehearsed social scripts, and so on—will never create true confidence because it will never be authentic.

Authenticity, at its core, is the quality of being fully yourself. Being authentic means being emotionally honest, clear about your experience of the world and free of pretense. It means responding organically to every moment of life—the positive and the negative—and not feeling the need to unnecessarily “pretend” about your feelings, beliefs or experiences in any way.

In everyday language, we call this quality being “real.” And when we meet someone “real,” we feel that we’re in the presence of something exceptional. The reason, of course, is that we’re in the presence of true confidence. We feel that we’re meeting ourselves—that is, our best selves.

Authenticity transforms normal insecurity into grounded confidence. While faked confidence hides insecurity, weakness and self-doubt, true authenticity owns and acknowledges these less pleasant experiences in a way that ultimately enhances our sense of self.

It’s a strange paradox. It’s also a very useful one.

But to acknowledge these parts of ourselves requires more than just authenticity. It requires vulnerability. It requires us to open up and be exposed—to be seen—as the people we really are.

When authenticity and vulnerability link up—when we become organically and honestly open to sharing our true experiences, even when those experiences make us seem insecure—they actually create true confidence.

Why?

In short, because honesty and openness are the raw stuff of true confidence.

By allowing people to see who we really are, we stop offering a proxy version of ourselves to hide the aspects of our personalities we’d rather not show. And by embracing who we really are, we also relinquish control over how other people might perceive us—which, if you think about it, is a classic hallmark of insecurity.

In other words, we don’t become confident by never feeling insecure. We become confident by dropping the need to hide our insecurity in the first place.

It took me years to realize that we don’t need to always feel confident to be confident. And we don’t need to act confident to appear confident. All we need to do is respond authentically to our experiences, and share those experiences—in the appropriate amounts, in appropriate ways, in appropriate contexts—even (and, ironically enough, especially!) when they reveal our lack of confidence. Despite what we’ve been told, vulnerability isn’t weakness—it’s true strength.

This is a principle that the world’s greatest athletes, most successful entrepreneurs and most prolific artists understand: the alchemical power of authentic vulnerability. As Kobe Bryant famously said, “I have self-doubt. I have insecurity. I have fear of failure … We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.”

By embracing it, Bryant managed to authentically acknowledge and vulnerably admit to his insecurity, self-doubt and fear of failure, which only enhanced his grounded sense of self.

That possibility is open to every single one of us.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to a dinner party for a bunch of broadcasters and media folks. The room was filled with smart, talented, ambitious people, and none of us knew one another. At dinner, I was seated next to a quiet guy who didn’t say much at first. As we often do in these cases, I assumed that he either wasn’t very friendly or was struggling with his social confidence. After a few minutes of conversation, however, he said something that took me by surprise.

“I’m kind of nervous to be around all these new people,” he confessed with a shy smile. “I’m used to producing my show alone in my house, and I really didn’t feel like going out tonight, but I forced myself to come and make some new friends.”

In an instant, my entire perception of this person had changed.

He was still exhibiting the same unconfident behaviors, but by unabashedly owning and sharing them, he shifted my perception from “unfriendly” to “human,” from “nervously unconfident” to “authentically vulnerable.” What he did, really, was offer me a window into his experience, and that experience was deeply honest.

That gave me permission to tell him that that I was a little overwhelmed, too, and just like that, we were bonding over our shared experience of the evening. He ended up being my favorite person at that dinner party, and we’re still good friends to this day.

So as you move through your life, make a conscious effort to commit to authentic vulnerability. At the same time, avoid the trap of inauthentic vulnerability—such as oversharing, strategic revelations and inappropriately personal stories—which are really just another way of simulating confidence.

Notice what this mindset does to your sense of self. Notice how confidence and insecurity are totally compatible, as long as you drop the impulse to self-protect.

Most importantly, notice that you cannot be confident without acknowledging your true experience moment to moment. That is a profound inner shift that goes deeper than superficial behaviors. It’s precisely the raw stuff of trust, rapport and relationship building—key skills that thrive on authentic confidence.

4. A process-oriented mindset.

By now you might have noticed an underlying theme in our approach to confidence.

Whereas popular self-help usually treats confidence as a static, goal-oriented, binary quality—basically, you either have it or you don’t—true confidence is, in fact, a process. It ebbs and flows. It accelerates and decelerates. It takes hits and has to recover. And it’s always evolving over the course of our lives as we take on new situations, challenges and goals.

Thinking about confidence as a process, rather than an end in and of itself, opens us up to a much healthier relationship to our own self-esteem.

We no longer believe that we must be confident one hundred percent of the time in order to be effective. We stop beating ourselves up for having moments of confusion, insecurity or self-doubt, which are perfectly normal parts of a healthy ego. And we don’t buy into the notion that if we just look or act or behave a certain way, confidence will magically appear.

Most importantly, we avoid falling into the trap of thinking we can develop “unshakable confidence.”

Unshakable confidence is a myth, and when you see it, you can bet that there’s some insecurity being protected beneath the surface. Confidence that can be shaken isn’t insecurity or weakness; it’s a sign that you can work through setbacks, criticism and growth. Which, if you think about it, is the whole point of having confidence in the first place!

Process-oriented confidence is the opposite of the “fake it till you make it” philosophy.

While the “fake it till you make it” approach suggests we should pretend our way toward true confidence, the process-oriented approach suggests we should become our way toward true confidence.

And while “faking it” does play a small role in confidence—for example, inviting confidence into your body using the nonverbal communication and vocal tonality exercises we mentioned earlier—it will never build true confidence. One way or another, simulating confidence will always create new problems.

It’s worth discussing a few of the most common, so we understand the risks of inauthentic confidence.

For one thing, faking it till we make it creates an inauthentic self—the supposedly “confident” person— which creates a division between the person you really are and the person you’re pretending to be. At best, we become two insecure people: the true self desperate for confidence, and the false self grasping at confidence in order to hide the true self.

As a result, that false self creates new feelings of fraudulence and self-doubt that will, sooner or later, betray you when you need your confidence the most. (This, in a nutshell, is impostor syndrome.) Eventually, one of two things will happen. Either your false self will break down, revealing the unaddressed insecurities lurking beneath. Or it will grow stronger and stronger, moving you further and further away from a healthy and secure sense of self.

The entire act of faking confidence will also become exhausting, confusing and alienating, as keeping up appearances becomes your primary objective. The fear of being exposed as less than confident will only grow. That in turn will make you double down on faking it in order to protect the false self, which will further increase the cost of being exposed—a truly vicious cycle.

For all these reasons, we at Six-Minute Networking don’t advocate for the “fake it till you make it” approach. Instead of acquiring confidence by building a new self, we prefer to work with our students to develop confidence by being their true selves. We then give them exercises, principles and mindsets that help them develop more and more authentic confidence. Anything else is a short-term fix, an unreliable hack and a recipe for even deeper insecurity.

A process-oriented approach means letting go of the impulse to pretend that we’re confident when we’re not. It also means accepting that our confidence will take hits from time to time. If we authentically acknowledge when our confidence takes a hit, then we put ourselves in a position to rediscover it—not by faking our way back into confidence, but by doing the work required to rebuild it. In practical terms, that means putting time into our craft, investing in new skills, repairing relationships, sticking with difficult goals, and—most importantly—being patient as our confidence steadily evolves.

That’s the stuff of true and authentic confidence. That’s how we can work on confidence without compromising our identities and values. That’s how we survive when our confidence takes a hit, and how we can actually enhance our self-assurance when we struggle. That’s how we become truly confident, by committing to the life-changing process of simply being ourselves.

https://www.success.com/the-art-of-true-confidence/

Jordan Harbinger

Articles

Jordan Harbinger hosts The Jordan Harbinger Show, where he deconstructs the playbooks of the most successful people on earth and shares their strategies, perspectives and insights with the rest of us. He’s also the co-founder of Six-Minute Networking, a training company that offers workshops on nonverbal communication, persuasion and influence to corporate and military organizations.

Topley’s Top 10 – March 25, 2022

1.5 Out of 6 Days 1%+ Return….What happens next?

In the table below we have aggregated forward returns for the prior 4 occurrences to see how the index faired following a period in which 5 out of 6 days were north of 1%. The last time the index saw this occur was in November of 2020, while each of the other three dates followed significant downturns in the market. Looking at the forward returns, we observed that 1-week later the index pushed higher on average, while 2-weeks later the index appeared to pullback slightly in 2 out of the 4 occurrences. Looking out 1-month and further returns were positive on average and generally positive on individual occurrences, except for 3-months following the October 1974 date. 6- and 12-months out, SPX gained 16.97% and 26.67% on average lending one to think that the long-term outlook is positive following 5 out of 6 days being north of 1%. While we don’t know for sure we could see the index move higher from here, the historical tendency is nothing to be ignored.    

https://www.nasdaq.com/solutions/nasdaq-dorsey-wright


2. Top 100 Corporate Pensions Most Funded Since 2008

Zerohedge blog

 

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/forget-retro-fitted-narratives-nomura-warns-equities-are-still-flows-positioning-story


3. Netflix and Disney have Given Up Nearly All of their Pandemic Gains

 

Barrons

https://www.barrons.com


 4. Fertilizer Price Index Up 3x…Breaks Out to 20 Year Highs

Commodities:  Next, fertilizer prices and shares of companies in that sector have been surging.

Source: @AndreasSteno

The Daily Shot https://dailyshotbrief.com/the-daily-shot-brief-march-23rd-2022/


5. With Huge Spike in Used Car Prices….Here is Perspective of Prices Since 1980

Jack Ablin Cresset–The price of a new automobile, adjusted for inflation, is more than 43 per cent cheaper than it was in 1980, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Services costs, for work that generally couldn’t be outsourced, rose more than 26 per cent relative to inflation over the same period. The favorable blend of restrained inflation and higher productivity helped lower America’s inflation rate from a whopping 12.5 per cent at the end of 1980, to a scant 1.4 per cent by 2020. Today’s 7.9 per cent inflation rate is the highest reading since the early 1980s.

Graph 3, Market Update, 03.15.2022

https://cressetcapital.com/post/globalization-40-years-on-adjustment-not-reversal/


6. Poll of 132 Oil and Gas Firms….Why are you restraining growth?

https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano


7. Canada Increasing LNG Output by 300,000 Barrells …Canada has Cleanest LNG


8. Large Investors Own 6% of U.S. Homes….Small Investors 27%…..Traditional Homeowners 67%

Large investors (own 10+ homes) purchased 6% of the homes in the country in January.
Small investors (<10 homes) purchased 27%.
Owner occupants purchased 67%.
The total investor share (33%) is a 5% larger market share than the average over the last decade.

No alternative text description for this image

https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnburns7/


9. Rising Rents Huge Component of Inflation.

Pew Research

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/23/key-facts-about-housing-affordability-in-the-u-s/ft_22-03-23_housingaffordability_2a/


10. How to Decide What to Work On

Working hard all day doesn’t matter if it’s on the wrong tasks. The most critical factor in your productivity is what you decide to work on.

The question of what to work on is under-discussed. There’s plenty of advice on getting work done: setting up good habits, creating productivity systems, project management and planning. Yet, there’s relative silence for the crucial decision of which projects to pursue.

Choosing what to work on is hard because you can’t know in advance how any project will turn out. If you knew what perspective was most worthwhile, the right choice would be obvious. It would simply be a matter of doing the work. But these choices exist outside of any particular vantage point. We don’t have this information, and we have to choose anyway.

Ruling Out, Ruling In

A fundamental distinction is between having too many ideas or too few.

Too many ideas creates the problem of prioritization. You need to find reasons to disqualify projects. Evaluate your current activities and cull those that don’t make the cut.

Too few ideas can leave you feeling stuck. You want things to be better, but nothing pops out as worth pursuing. As a result, you put half-hearted efforts into tasks you’re not sure will work.

The “right” quantity of ideas isn’t a given. Instead, it’s a mental threshold for what’s worth pursuing. Dialing it up forces you to focus, and dialing it down lets you explore more options.  Plans often generate ongoing or future commitments. Thus, there’s often a lag between when you realize your threshold is off and when you can adjust it. Whether you’re set too far in one direction may feel obvious, even as you struggle to change it.

Both reason and intuition factor into your settings here. Feeling burned out or bored can cause you to adjust. But so can looking at your calendar and realizing, actually no, you can’t take on another client.

Coming Up With Ideas

The origin of ideas often seems mysterious. How can you force yourself to have a creative spark?

Except, in practice, most ideas—even groundbreaking ones—tend to be derivative or incremental. Even ideas that look original usually start out as a permutation on something already extant. Given background and context, even the most radical suggestions look like incremental steps.

This suggests that the best way to have better ideas is to expose yourself to more ideas. Which ideas? The ones used by people who are accomplishing things in roughly the direction you’d like to go.

Find people who are achieving the sorts of success you’d like for yourself then ask what type of projects they pursue. If you can extract the general idea behind these projects, and why they worked, you’ll narrow the space of possibilities considerably.

Making the Choice

A threshold for action is a crude way for filtering your projects. Advice to “do less” or “do more” misses the crux of the issue. Which efforts should you drop? Which ones should you undertake?

Having adjusted your threshold, and hopefully immersed yourself in a range of possible idea templates, now you need to cross over from a notion to a commitment.

A commitment can come from either direction. You can lower your threshold for action, generate a new idea and decide to pursue it. Or you can tighten your standards and commit to focusing on a pursuit you are already engaged in. Either way, the decision remains.

I find it useful to separate deciding from executing. The act of deciding needs to be realistic, perhaps even somewhat pessimistic. Executing that decision needs an almost irrational confidence and headstrong spirit. Failure to separate the two tends to result in impulsive choices and irresolute action.

For instance, the decision to start a business needs to be clear-eyed about the risks, your plan, and your odds of success. However, once you start that business, you need to be zealously committed to doing everything you can to make it work.

One way to help manage these two conflicting mental states is to separate them in time. Make a decision, and don’t let yourself change it for a month. The delay forces you to stop second-guessing yourself when you need to work. The nearby offramp helps you avoid worrying that you’re committing indefinitely to a potentially ruinous choice.

Finding a Path and Walking It

Much of life boils down to figuring out a path for yourself and then getting yourself to actually walk it.

It’s easy to dismiss either half of the problem. If the path seems obvious, you might think everyone who fails to walk it is simply lazy. Or perhaps you can’t find the path, so it seems everyone walking forward is a delusional striver.

But both halves of the problem interact. We often fail to stick to our plans because we’re not confident in our chosen path. And we fail to find paths forward because we don’t try enough things to find our footing.

Decision and action are always combined. The challenge is taking the next step.

Scott Young https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/

Topley’s Top 10 – March 22, 2022

1. S&P Gains Last Week are Historically Bullish Going Forward

From Dave Lutz at Jones Trading

History was made last week, LPL notes – For only the 5th time ever, the S&P 500 gained at least 1% for 4 consecutive days.  This rare occurrence is also quite bullish, as a year later it has been up more than 20% every single time with an average gain of 28.0%.


2. Index Performance After 15 Worst Starts to Calendar Year

https://www.nasdaq.com/solutions/nasdaq-dorsey-wright


3. China Internet Stock Crash 3x Faster than 1999 U.S. Tech Bubble

@Charlie Bilello After its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq composite fell 78% to its low in October 2002. That took 31 months. From its high in February 2021 to its low last week, the China Internet ETF $KWEB fell 79% in just 13 months.

Powered by YCharts

The rapid decline pushed valuation multiples down across the board, with Alibaba ($BABA) trading at the same price to sales ratio (1.6x) as Campbell Soup ($CPB).


4. German PPI (inflation) 26.5%

Jim Reid-Deutsche Bank

German PPI came out this morning at a 25.9% YoY level. Using long-term data spliced from various sources, this is the highest since the aftermath of WWII and on par with the highest peacetime levels on record. This time last year it was still just under 2%!

Although energy makes up just over the half of the total, even PPI ex-Energy is now at 12.4% YoY. For context in the 1970s, overall PPI didn’t get above 15% YoY.

One of the most fascinating accounts of the 1970s I read around this time last year was that of the Fed by ex-staffer and famous economist Stephen Roach. When energy spiked, the Chair Arthur Burns asked his staffers to devise an ex-energy inflation series and was comforted that this measure showed inflation was more contained. His view was that this energy spike had nothing to do with monetary policy. But soon he had to ask for another basket to be created ex food and energy. Again he was relatively calm at the lack of inflation elsewhere and believed food price rises were more to do with an El Nino. This stripping out continued until less than a third of the basket was left and eventually the Fed had to admit that inflation was broad based as even this stripped-out inflation series was in double digits.

So maybe there is little the Fed and the ECB can do about energy costs, but it’s worth remembering that the real central bank rates in both regions are massively negative and at their lowest post-WWII in the former, and clearly the lowest (by a long, long way) on record for the ECB. So are they pouring fuel on a fire?


5. Food Price Index hit record high in February, UN agency reports

Nominal and Real Terms New Highs

Global food prices reached an all-time high in February, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported on Friday.

The Food Price Index, which tracks the international prices of a items such as vegetable oils and dairy products, averaged 140.7 points last month, or nearly four per cent up from January.

This is also 24.1 per cent over the level a year earlier and 3.1 points higher than in February 2011.

Factors behind food inflation 

“Concerns over crop conditions and adequate export availabilities explain only a part of the current global food price increases. A much bigger push for food price inflation comes from outside food production, particularly the energy, fertilizer and feed sectors,” said FAO economist Upali Galketi Aratchilage.

“All these factors tend to squeeze profit margins of food producers, discouraging them from investing and expanding production.”

As the Food Price Index measures average prices over the month, the February reading only partly incorporates market effects stemming from the conflict in Ukraine.

Rise in demand 

The overall rise last month was driven by an 8.5 per cent increase in the FAO Vegetable Oils Price Index, a new record high.

This was mostly due to sustained global import demand, which coincided with a few supply-side factors, such as lower soybean production prospects in South America.

The Dairy Price Index averaged 6.4 per cent higher in February than January, supported by lower-than-expected milk supplies in Western Europe and Oceania, as well as persistent import demand, especially from North Asia and the Middle East.

Last month, the Cereal Price Index increased 3.0 per cent over January. Contributing factors  included rising quotations for maize and other coarse grains, caused by continued concerns over crop conditions in South America, uncertainty about maize exports from Ukraine, and rising wheat export prices.

Strong global import demand contributed to the 1.1 per cent rise in the Meat Price Index. Other factors included tight supplies of slaughter-ready cattle in Brazil and a high demand for herd rebuilding in Australia.

The FAO Sugar Price Index declined by nearly two per cent amid favourable production prospects in India, Thailand and other major exporters, as well as improved growing conditions in Brazil.

Cereal forecast

FAO has also published a preliminary forecast that shows worldwide cereal output is on course to increase to 790 million tonnes this year.

Anticipated high yields and extensive planting in North America and Asia, should offset a likely slight decrease in the European Union and the adverse impact of drought conditions on crops in some of the North African countries.

The agency has updated its forecast for world cereal production in 2021, which is now pegged at 2,796 million tonnes, a 0.7 percent increase from the year before.

The forecast for world trade in cereals was also raised to 484 million tonnes, up nearly one per cent from the 2020/2021 level. The forecast does not assume potential impacts from the conflict in Ukraine, and FAO is closely monitoring the developments and will assess impacts in due course.

Fears for food security 

Relatedly, the head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has highlighted how the crisis in Ukraine could impact global food security

IFAD President Gilbert F. Houngbo said continuation of the conflict, which is already a tragedy for those directly involved, will be catastrophic for the entire world, particularly for people already struggling to feed their families.

He warned that the fighting could limit the world’s supply of staple crops like wheat, corn and sunflower oil, resulting in skyrocketing food prices and hunger. This could jeopardize global food security and heighten geopolitical tensions.

“This area of the Black Sea plays a major role in the global food system, exporting at least 12 percent of the food calories traded in the world,” said Mr. Houngbo.

“Forty percent of wheat and corn exports from Ukraine go to the Middle East and Africa, which are already grappling with hunger issues, and where further food shortages or price increases could stoke social unrest.”

https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/03/1113332#:~:text=The%20Food%20Price%20Index%2C%20which,per%20cent%20up%20from%20January.&text=This%20is%20also%2024.1%20per,higher%20than%20in%20February%202011.


6. Corn and Wheat ETFs


7. Farm Equipment Stocks

Deere New Highs  after 1 year sideways

CAT still below May 21 highs

www.stockcharts.com


8. Utilities Stocks Break Out to New Highs

This chart shows strength of utilities vs. AGG (bond index)

www.stockcharts.com


9. Manhattan’s Third-Largest Hotel To Sell At Staggering Loss

ZEROHEDGE BY TYLER DURDEN By Ciara Long of BisNow.com,

One of the largest hotels in New York City will trade at a massive loss, an ominous sign for the owners of Manhattan’s big hospitality properties.

Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel

Host Hotels & Resorts has agreed to sell its Sheraton New York Times Square hotel for $365M, Real Estate Alert reported, less than half the $738M it paid for the 1,780-room property in 2006.

Host, the largest U.S. hotel real estate investment trust, is under contract to sell the property to MCR Hotels, one of the most active buyers of New York City hotel properties since the onset of the pandemic. The sale is the city’s largest hospitality trade in over two years. The 51-story hotel is New York City’s third-largest by room count.

Host was struggling to sell the property at the price it purchased the hotel for long before the pandemic, asking for $550M in 2018, according to REA. In 2020, Host admitted that the Times Square Sheraton’s value had sunk even lower, to $495M.

The Times Square Sheraton sale adds Host to the list of several NYC hotel owners to sell their properties at a discount. Hotels in the city have yet to return to their pre-coronavirus occupancy rates, and the omicron wave in December and January suppressed tourism’s nascent return to NYC.

The hotel’s new owner, MCR, is the fourth-largest hotel owner-operator in the U.S. and has been making aggressive purchases in major cities over the past year, including MarriottHilton and Hampton Inn hotel branches across the country. Several of its 2021 purchases were concentrated in Texas, where it bought 11 properties: three in Dallas, three in Houston and five in Fort Worth, according to releases from the company.

But MCR also made two notable NYC purchases in 2021, The Real Deal reports. It joined with Island Capital and Three Wall Capital to acquire the Lexington Hotel at 511 Lexington Ave. for $185M, and it bought the Royalton Hotel at 60 West 37th St. for $42M. Both sales were below the price paid by previous owners.

MCR is also the owner of the Ink 48 Hotel and the High Line Hotel, which were ranked among NYC’s top 20 hotel choices by Condé Nast Traveler’s Readers Choice Awards last year.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/manhattans-third-largest-hotel-sell-staggering-loss


10. The 3 Elements of Trust

by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman

Summary.   As a leader, you want the people in your organization to trust you. And with good reason. In our coaching with leaders, we often see that trust is a leading indicator of whether others evaluate them positively or negatively. But how to create that trust, or perhaps…more

As a leader, you want the people in your organization to trust you. And with good reason. In our coaching with leaders, we often see that trust is a leading indicator of whether others evaluate them positively or negatively. But creating that trust or, perhaps more importantly, reestablishing it when you’ve lost it isn’t always that straightforward.

Fortunately, by looking at data from the 360 assessments of 87,000 leaders, we were able to identify three key clusters of items that are often the foundation for trust. We looked for correlations between the trust rating and all other items in the assessment and after selecting the 15 highest correlations, we performed a factor analysis that revealed these three elements. Further analysis showed that the majority of the variability in trust ratings could be explained by these three elements.

The Three Elements of Trust

By understanding the behaviors that underlie trust, leaders are better able to elevate the level of trust that others feel toward them. Here are the three elements.

Positive Relationships. Trust is in part based on the extent to which a leader is able to create positive relationships with other people and groups. To instill trust a leader must:

  • Stay in touch on the issues and concerns of others.
  • Balance results with concern for others.
  • Generate cooperation between others.
  • Resolve conflict with others.
  • Give honest feedback in a helpful way.

Good Judgement/Expertise. Another factor in whether people trust a leader is the extent to which a leader is well-informed and knowledgeable. They must understand the technical aspects of the work as well as have a depth of experience. This means:

  • They use good judgement when making decisions.
  • Others trust their ideas and opinions.
  • Others seek after their opinions.
  • Their knowledge and expertise make an important contribution to achieving results.
  • Can anticipate and respond quickly to problems.

Consistency. The final element of trust is the extent to which leaders walk their talk and do what they say they will do. People rate a leader high in trust if they:

  • Are a role model and set a good example.
  • Walk the talk.
  • Honor commitments and keep promises.
  • Follow through on commitments.
  • Are willing to go above and beyond what needs to be done.

We wanted to understand how these three elements interacted to create the likelihood that people would trust a leader. We created three indices for each element and since we had such a large dataset, we experimented with how performance on each of the dimensions impacted the overall trust score. In our study we found that if a leader scored at or above the 60th percentile on all three factors, their overall trust score was at the 80th percentile.

We compared high scores (above 60th percentile) and low scores (below the 40th percentile) to examine the impact these had on the three elements that enabled trust. Note that these levels are not extremely high or low. Basically, they are 10 percentile points above and below the norm. This is important because it means that being just above average on these skills can have a profound positive effect and, conversely, just being below average can destroy trust.

We also found that level of trust is highly correlated with how people rate a leader’s overall leadership effectiveness. It has the strongest impact on the direct reports’ and peer overall ratings. The manager’s ratings and the engagement ratings were not as highly correlated, but all the differences are statistically significant.

Do You Need All Three Elements of Trust?

We were also curious to know if leaders needed to be skilled in all three elements to generate a high level of trust and whether any one element had the most significant impact on the trust rating. To gauge this, we created an experiment where we separated leaders into high and low levels on each of the three pillars and then measured the level of trust.

Intuitively we thought that consistency would be the most important element. Saying one thing and doing another seems like it would hurt trust the most. While our analysis showed that inconsistency does have a negative impact (trust went down 17 points), it was relationships that had the most substantial impact. When relationships were low and both judgment and consistency were high, trust went down 33 points. This may be because many leaders are seen as occasionally inconsistent. We all intend to do things that don’t get done, but once a relationship is damaged or if it was never formed in the first place, it’s difficult for people to trust.

We often tell people that they don’t need to be perfect to be an excellent leader but when it comes to trust, all three of these elements need to be above average. Remember that, in our analysis, we set the bar fairly low: at the 60th percentile. This is not a brilliant level of performance, barely above average.

We have regularly found in our research that if a leader has a preference for a particular skill, they are more likely to perform better at it. Think about which of these elements of trust you have a stronger preference for – and which you prefer least. Because you need to be above average on each, it is probably worth your time to focus on improving the latter.

https://hbr.org/2019/02/the-3-elements-of-trust?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hbr&utm_source=LinkedIn&tpcc=orgsocial_edit

Topley’s Top 10 – March 18, 2022

1. Over the Last 8 Years Global Central Banks Bought $260B Gold vs. $60B Treasuries

In a podcast with Grant Williams, Gromen said that over the last eight years, global central banks have bought about $260 billion worth of gold, compared to $60 billion in Treasurys. “So there’s been this very slow, but steady and recently accelerating move toward the away from this dollar system that broke in 2005, through 2008 to this system that looks a lot like what was proposed by [John Maynard] Keynes 80 years ago,” he says.

www.marketwatch.com

This chart is showing gold vs. 10 year U.S. treasury….Gold clear break-out of 2 year sideways channel.

www.stockcharts.com


2. The Russian Ruble Under Putin.

James Eagle  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameseagle/


3. The High Yield Bond Default Rate Plummeted to Lows

Does this signal the start of the next distressed cycle? No one knows. What we do know is that a record amount of non-investment-grade debt is outstanding in the U.S. – over $3 trillion at the end of 2021 (see Figure 5). So there are plenty of leveraged companies out there that are only one idiosyncratic event away from being an actionable target for special situations investors. And in an imperfect world, that’s something you can count on happening over and over and over again.

Figure 5: U.S. Leveraged Debt Outstanding Has Ballooned

Source: S&P Global Leveraged Commentary & Data

Oakmark Research

The Roundup: Top Takeaways From Oaktree’s Quarterly Letters – 1Q2022 (oaktreecapital.com)


4. 30 Year Mortgage Averaging 4% Nationally

www.stockcharts.com


5. Coffee -17% Correction in one month


6. Gas Production from American Shale Already at New Record


7. Annual Venture Capital Funding Shatters All Records…..100+ Unicorn Births Every Quarter

https://www.cbinsights.com/research-new-normal-in-venture?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=marketing_linkedin-retargeting_2022-02&utm_content=venture-persona&li_fat_id=162b6558-85f3-469c-8bc9-c67862048b5c


8. Housing Supply is Coming…Housing Starts Hit 16 Year High

This pushed Housing Starts to their highest SAAR since June 2006 as Permits pulls back from similar highs…

Source: Bloomberg   from zerohedge  https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/us-housing-starts-surged-16-year-high-feb


9. Poland Mobilizes Overnight to Take in 2m Refugees

Warsaw rolls out the red carpet for refugees

Nearly 3 million Ukrainians have fled the country since Russian forces invaded. Most of them—roughly 1.8 million—have arrived in neighboring Poland, and as many as 300,000 have settled in the capital, Warsaw.

  • For context, it’s as if the entire city of Pittsburgh moved to Warsaw in just three weeks.

They’ve received a hero’s welcome. The city’s government, businesses, and citizens mobilized remarkably fast and have opened 22 shelters in the city, enrolled nearly 2,800 Ukrainian children into its school system, donated food, and coordinated volunteer counselors and translators.

Still, Warsaw and the rest of Poland are bursting at the seams, and they won’t be able to sustain what has become the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II on their own. Some services in bigger Polish cities are reaching capacity and officials are asking organizations like the UN to help spread out incoming Ukrainians.

  • “The West has to wake up and send a strong signal that they [refugees] are welcome, not only in Poland and Romania and Slovakia, but everywhere,” Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski told CBS.

Big picture: Some aid workers have highlighted the difference in treatment for the current refugees with those who’ve previously arrived in Europe from Middle Eastern and African countries.—MM

         

https://www.morningbrew.com/daily


10. Luck and Executive Function–How belief in being lucky can have everyday benefits.

KEY POINTS

  • Belief in oneself as lucky can have consequences for self-efficacy.
  • Beliefs in oneself as unlucky can have consequences for the way we use our problem solving abilities.
  • The question now might be which came first: seeing oneself as unlucky, or executive dysfunction?

There is a difference between the way luck is defined in the laboratory and the way we talk about it in everyday life. Many of us see luck as an individual characteristic we each possess, part of the set of characteristics that makes each of us unique. One of the most interesting results to come out of the psychology labs that have been investigating luck is a change in the assessment of the consequences of believing in luck.

It used to be that social and cognitive psychology saw belief in luck as a characteristic of people who had an external locus of control, and that external locus of control was associated with poorer mental health (depression, anxiety, and helplessness). Externally located people believed that what happened to them was the result of some force outside of their own abilities. This led to the idea that believing in luck was unhealthy because it requires that you see yourself as unable to control or influence what goes on around you.

Recent research is changing this view of luck and luckiness. Seeing luck as a characteristic of your “self,” as something that makes you unique in the world, may actually be beneficial. Research has shown that believing that you are a lucky person may be an indicator of good mental health because it is associated with a personal characteristic whose power is often overlooked—hope.

Liza Day and John Maltby have been studying our belief in luck and what it might be doing for us. In 2005, they conducted two studies that examined the relationship between believing in good luck, optimism, and hope. They first asked a very large set of undergraduates to take a series of paper-and-pencil tests that measured these three characteristics. They found that the stronger the belief in hope was, the more optimistic the person was, and the more they believed that their goals could and would be achieved. They also tended to feel confident that they would be able to find a way around any obstacles that might appear along the route toward achieving their goal. Hope, in particular, turned out to be the best predictor of how much the students believed in luck.

Then they asked another set of students to think about a real and important life goal, and to then rate how confident they were that they would be able to achieve that goal, how hopeful they were, and how much they thought luck might be necessary in achieving that goal. Their results showed that belief in good luck was particularly important when we’re coming up with a plan to achieve a goal.

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Seeing luck as a personal characteristic was associated with hope, optimism, and generally good mental health. So, does seeing yourself as unlucky have the opposite set of consequences? Do you also see yourself as hopeless, pessimistic, anxious, and depressed?

It turns out that the answer is…not exactly. Maltby et al., hypothesized that believing in your own unluckiness would have consequences for the way executive functions are used. Executive functions are mediated by our frontal lobes and include planning what to do next, coming up with alternatives when our first plan doesn’t work out, organizing what we know, switching from solving a problem in one way to solving it in another, and inhibiting an incorrect response.

Maltby and colleagues measured belief in personal unluckiness, optimism, self-efficacy, belief in the irrational in general, and executive functions. They found that the stronger one’s belief in personal unluckiness was, the weaker one’s belief in self-efficacy and the lower the levels of optimism were. People who saw themselves as unlucky also tended to be introverted, were more likely to hold irrational beliefs in general, were more difficult to get along with, and were less likely to try new things.

They asked their volunteers to take part in a task that tested their ability to switch from one problem-solving strategy to another, an aspect of executive function known as switching. The more unlucky a participant saw him- or herself as being, the worse their ability to switch from a simple task to a complex one.

Then, they asked participants to try their hand at the Stroop task designed to measure another aspect of executive functioning—the ability to suppress or inhibit a response. Participants saw three different kinds of stimuli appear on the screen, in random order. Congruent stimuli (where the word and the color of the ink the word was presented and matched—the word “pink” in pink ink for example), neutral stimuli, and incongruent stimuli (the word “pink” presented in green ink).

For most of us, reading is an automatic behavior, and we do it very well. In the Stroop task, you are asked to report the color of the ink and to ignore the word. This is much harder to do. It takes longer and we make more mistakes because we have to inhibit our natural, over-learned tendency to read the word. That inhibition is an executive function.

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The more unlucky people believed themselves to be, the longer they took on this task and the more mistakes they made. Seeing yourself as unlucky apparently made it even harder to suppress the reading response.

Maltby et al., went on to measure several other aspects of executive function and their relationship to believing oneself to be unlucky and concluded that people who saw unluckiness as a personal characteristic didn’t do well on these executive function tasks.

Seeing oneself as unlucky didn’t directly lead to depression and anxiety, but it was paired with a tendency toward executive dysfunction. The question now might be which came first: seeing oneself as unlucky, or executive dysfunction?

Barbara Blatchley Ph.D.  https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-are-the-chances/202109/luck-and-executive-function?collection=1172589