Topley’s Top 10 – December 15, 2021

1.Bonds Worst Inflation Adjusted Returns Since 1980

The federal government’s debt has already lost about 2% outright over the past year as the Federal Reserve started removing pandemic-era stimulus from the economy and inched closer toward raising interest rates. But on top of that, the consumer price index has surged 6.8%, putting investors even deeper in the hole.

Taken together, that’s resulting in the worst real returns — or those adjusted for inflation — since the early 1980s, when then Fed Chair Paul Volcker was in the midst of fighting a wage-price spiral. What’s more, the dynamic isn’t expected to change: The bond market is projecting that 10-year Treasury yields will hold below the inflation rate for the next decade, meaning any investment income will be more than wiped out by the rising cost of living.

Bond Traders Stare at Worst Real Returns Since Volcker Era

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-13/bond-traders-stare-at-worst-real-returns-since-paul-volcker-era?sref=GGda9y2L

2.Charts from 2 Big Insider Sales TSLA and MSFT

Musk Sold Shares….Tesla clean close below 200 day after failing to make new highs.

Microsoft CEO sold large stake-Fails to make new high approaching 50 day.

www.stockcharts.com

3.Hong Kong Market Trading Below Book Value.

Hong Kong’s main stock benchmark is trading below book value. Yup, the entire index. @DavidInglesTV

https://twitter.com/DavidInglesTV

4.Fund Managers at 5.1% Cash….10 Year High

Fund managers dashed for cash in anticipation of more aggressive Federal Reserve policy, according to the latest survey conducted by Bank of America.

The allocation to cash rose to 5.1% in December from 4.4% in November, the survey of 371 panellists running $1.1 trillion in assets under management found. The survey was conducted between Dec. 3 and 9.

Fund managers dash for cash ahead of Fed decision https://www.marketwatch.com/story/fund-managers-dash-for-cash-ahead-of-fed-decision-11639485080?mod=bnbh_mwarticle&link=sfmw_tw

5.AAPL, MSFT, NVDA,TSLA, GOOGL Have Contributed 51% of S&P Returns Since April

Goldman Rings The Alarm On Collapsing Market Breadth: 51% Of All Market Gains Since April Are From Just 5 Stocks-BY TYLER DURDEN Goldman then calculates that just the five most popular tech names – AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, TSLA, GOOGL – have contributed 51% of S&P 500 returns since April. After contributing over double their starting weight to the index’s return, these stocks now make up 22% of the S&P 500 by market cap, a 4% increase from the start of the year.

Outside of these 5, the table below shows the 25 S&P 500 stocks that made the largest absolute contributions to the index YTD.

Good Full Read Below

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/goldman-rings-alarm-collapsing-market-breadth-51-all-market-gains-april-are-just-5-stocks

6.It’s 5 Tech Stocks and Defensive Consumer Staples Leading Since November

Chart-Consumer Staples Breaking Out vs. S&P…..Megacap tech and consumer staples lead.

https://lplresearch.com/2021/12/14/record-high-for-the-consumer-staples-sector/

7.Lithium Benchmark +240% YTD

WSJ–By Amrith Ramkumar

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lithium-prices-soar-turbocharged-by-electric-vehicle-demand-and-scant-supply-11639334956?mod=itp_wsj&ru=yahoo

8.Population Growth of Prime Age Workers is Set to Slow thru 2025

John Burns Real Estate-Today’s labor shortage was perfectly predictable.
So is tomorrow’s labor shortage.
Immigration policy can move the needle, but the growth of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s will almost certainly not return.

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

9.Omicron 3% of Cases in U.S. Last Week.

Barrons

https://www.barrons.com

10.How to turn the 2 fears that most often lead to failure into strengths, according to a successful entrepreneur

Daniel Cáceres and Nathan Rennolds ,

There are ways to turn your fears into motivation. PeopleImages/Getty Images

  • Fear is natural. It often just means you’re stepping out of your comfort zone.
  • If you let it to get the better of you, though, it can stop you getting ahead — in and out of work.
  • The founder of a professional development program, Raul Villacis, gave his tips to beat two fears.

Get a daily selection of our top stories based on your reading preferences.

Fear is a natural way of telling you that you’re leaving your comfort zone and you should pay more attention to what you’re doing.

It can become a major problem, however, if it starts to dominate your mind — it can lead you to make bad decisions, both in daily life and at work.

You may find that you’re too afraid to ask for a raise or that you’re too scared to start the business you’ve always dreamed of starting.

In situations like this, fear causes you to fail. Fortunately, there are ways to turn your fears into motivation.

Raul Villacis, entrepreneur, investor, and motivational speaker, explained in a video for Entrepreneur the two most dangerous types of fear in the workplace and how to use them as motivation.

Fear of not being good enough

The first fear is the fear of not being good enough. Villacis explained that this fear stems from our ancestors, who had to hunt for their survival.

“The fear that if they were not good hunters, they would die,” he said.

That same fear still exists today, even though we no longer have to go out and hunt for our food.

Overcoming this fear is all about understanding that you’re working towards a better future.

“Yes you’re going to mess up, yes you’re not going to be perfect, but at the same time find the edge, meaning can you create progress every day?” Villacis said.

“Your job is not to be the best today. Your job is to create progress,” he added.

Fear of not being liked

The second fear that can harm your career is the fear of not being liked.

The good news is that this fear can motivate you to be a good person or a good worker.

However, it’s also easy to fall into the trap of constantly seeking appreciation, and this will always leave you feeling that you’re not good enough.

According to Villacis, the trick here is to understand that the most important thing is that you like yourself.

“The most important person that you have to be one with, that you have to love, is yourself,” he said.

The key is to truly realize and accept one thing.

“I am not perfect. But I am a work in progress,” he said.

for the virtual world

Read the original article on Business Insider España. Copyright 2021.

This post has been translated from Spanish.

Follow Business Insider España on Twitter.https://www.businessinsider.com/two-fears-that-can-make-you-fail-in-your-job-2021-12

Topley’s Top 10 – December 14, 2021

1.Probability of 3 Rate Hikes in 2022-96%

https://dailyshotbrief.com/the-daily-shot-brief-december-10th-2021/


2.Small Cap Russell 2000

Small caps below 200day…held support here 4x since Summer.

www.stockcharts.com


3.Elon Musk Person of the Year..Jeff Bezos Won in 1999

@donnelly_brent

https://twitter.com/donnelly_brent


4.Highly valued S&P 500 index is ‘near the top of its 85-year trend channel,’ says Deutsche Bank

MarketwatchChristine Idzelis

www.marketwatch.com


5.Follow Up to Yesterday’s Top 5 Stocks……NASDAQ WOULD HAVE FALLEN OVER 20% IN 2021 WITHOUT ITS 5 BIGGEST STOCKS!

Jonathan Baird–Only the most casual investors will be unaware that the gains accrued by U.S. equity markets in recent years have been driven by a small number of stocks that continues to diminish in size.
While the S&P 500 is typically the subject of the most discussion, consideration of the Nasdaq index is important because its behaviour tends to lead other markets in both bull and bear markets. It is for this reason that the accompanying chart should raise eyebrows.

The 5 biggest weightings (sic 5) have produced more than 100% of the appreciation seen by the Nasdaq thus far in 2021. Without the fabled 5, the Nasdaq would be down more than 20%!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanbaird88/


6.The Big Positive is Still Earnings….Positive Revisions Beating Negative

Liz Ann Sonders Schwab

https://www.schwab.com/resource-center/insights/content/moving-stereo-churn-and-rotations-causing-swings-sentiment


7.Growth in Uses of Cash by Public Companies….Buybacks +194%

Sober Look Blog–The Carlyle Group summarizes the use of corporate cash in Chart 5. Since 2009, share buybacks have increased at enormous rate of 194% ; dividends have grown by 67%; and, business investment expanded a modest 43%. Rewarding shareholders with higher dividends and propping up share prices at the expense of investment in new plant, equipment and technology is a serious misallocation of resources at a time when the economy is experiencing slow growth and very poor productivity performance. It also represents serious short-sightedness on the part of management who feel so beholden to shareholders that they risk the longer term health of their companies.

http://soberlook.com/


8.Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

Kate Marino-For all the hype that wage growth has received this year, pay isn’t keeping up with price growth. Real earnings, or wage growth less inflation, turned sharply negative the last two months, after eeking out gains over the summer, consumer price data out Friday show.

Why it matters: That’s an erosion of spending power, which is a bummer. But for time being, it takes the edge off worries of a wage-price spiral, which happens when higher wages fuel inflation, which fuels the need for even higher wages — and so on.

  • The most recent data, of course, doesn’t tell us where we’re headed. “But you can try to extrapolate based on trends … and it seems like this fear of a wage-price spiral might not play out if wages aren’t actually keeping up with inflation,” Megan Greene, chief economist at the Kroll Institute and senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, tells Axios.

The big picture: Wage growth and price inflation are closely intertwined, but like the proverbial chicken and egg, experts have different views on what causes what.

  • Up to a certain point, wage growth is generally viewed as a good thing, especially when it flows to workers on the lower end of the income spectrum.
  • But corporate leaders and investors often view strong wage growth as a risk to company profits and, in times like this, a driver of inflation.
  • “It’s hard to know what’s leading and what’s lagging in that scenario,” Yung-Yu Ma, chief investment strategist at BMO Wealth Management, tells Axios.

The bottom line: A seemingly tight labor market means workers have power to demand pay increases — and there’s no reason they shouldn’t try to grab their piece of the pie.

  • If wages make gains in keeping up with inflation, we’ll probably argue about the chicken and egg regardless.

https://www.axios.com/wages-inflation-economic-data-c912afdb-b950-4183-8283-50afff593576.html


9.16% of Americans Have Earned Money in Gig Economy.

Pew Research

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/12/08/the-state-og-gig-work-in-2021/pi_2021-12-08_gig-work_0-01


10.Make Learning a Part of Your Daily Routine

by

Summary.   In our increasingly “squiggly” careers, where people change roles more frequently and fluidly and develop in different directions, the ability to unlearn, learn, and relearn is vital for long-term success. It helps us increase our readiness for the opportunities that change…more

Our capacity for learning is becoming the currency we trade on in our careers. Where we once went to work to learn to do a job, learning now is the job. Adaptive and proactive learners are highly prized assets for organizations, and when we invest in our learning, we create long-term dividends for our career development.

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, shared that when assessing founders of potential investments, he looks for individuals who have an “infinite learning curve”: someone who is constantly learning, and quickly. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, echoed the importance of learning when he said, “The learn-it-all will always do better than the know-it all.”

However, it’s not as simple as acquiring new knowledge. In our increasingly “squiggly” careers, where people change roles more frequently and fluidly and develop in different directions, the ability to unlearn, learn, and relearn is vital for long-term success. Based on our experience designing and delivering career development training for over 50,000 people worldwide, working with organizations including Virgin, Unilever, and Microsoft, we’ve identified several techniques and tools to help you make learning part of your day-to-day development.  

Learning

Since we spend so much of our time, energy, and efforts at our day jobs, they provide the most significant opportunities for learning. The challenge is that we don’t invest intentionally in everyday development — we’re so busy with tasks and getting the job done that there’s no space left for anything else. Deprioritizing our development is a risky career strategy because it reduces our resilience and ability to respond to the changes happening around us. Here are three ways to take ownership of your learning at work.

Learn from others

The people you spend time with are a significant source of knowledge. Creating a diverse learning community will offer you new perspectives and reduce the risk that you’ll end up in an echo chamber. Set a goal of having one curiosity coffee each month, virtually or in person, with someone you haven’t met before. This could be someone in a different department who could help you view your organization through a new lens or someone in your profession at another company who could broaden your knowledge. You can extend your curiosity even further by ending each conversation with the question: “Is there anyone else you think it would be useful for me to connect with?” Not only does this create the chance for new connections, but you might also benefit from a direct introduction.

Experiment

Experiments help you test, learn, and adapt along the way. There are endless ways you can experiment at work — for example, using different tools to increase the interactivity of your virtual presentationsexploring the impact of camera-on versus camera-off meetingsswitching from video to phone calls, or even trying out new negotiation tactics.

For an experiment to be effective, it needs to be a conscious choice and labeled as an opportunity for learning. Keep a learn-it-all log where you track the experiments you’re running and what you’re learning along the way. It’s important to remember that you should expect some experiments to fail, as that’s the nature of exploring the unknown.

Create a collective curriculum

In a squiggly career, everyone’s a learner and everyone’s a teacher. As a team, consider how you can create a collective curriculum where you’re learning from and with each other. We’ve seen organizations effectively use skills swaps where individuals share one skill they’re happy to help other people learn. This could look like a creative problem-solver offering to share the processes and tools they find most helpful, or someone who has expertise in coding running beginner lunch-and-learn sessions. Skills swaps are a good example of democratized development where everyone has something to contribute and is learning continually.

Unlearning

Unlearning means letting go of the safe and familiar and replacing it with something new and unknown. Skills and behaviors that helped you get to where you are can actually hold you back from getting to where you want to be. For example, a leader might need to unlearn their default of always being the person who speaks first in meetings. Or a new manager might need to unlearn always saying “yes” as their workload increases.

During the pandemic, we were all forced to unlearn some aspects of our lives, like how we collaborated on work or what school looked like for our kids. Unlearning feels uncomfortable, but the past couple of years have reminded us how adaptable we can be. Here are three ways to make unlearning an active part of how you work.

Connect with challengers

We unlearn when we look at a problem or opportunity through a new lens. This is more likely to happen if we’re spending time with people who challenge us and think differently than we do. The purpose of connecting with challengers is not to agree or debate but to listen and consider: What can I learn from this person?

Seek out people who have an opposite experience from you in some way. For example, if you’re in a large organization, find someone who has only ever worked for themselves. If you have 25 years of experience, find someone just starting out. People who have made different choices and have different areas of expertise than you are a good place to discover a new source of challenge. Asking people, “How would you approach this challenge?” or “What has your experience of this situation been?” is a good way to explore an alternative point of view.

Identify habits and hold backs

We all have habits that helped us get to where we are today. However, habits can create blind spots that stop us from seeing different ways of doing things or new approaches to try out. Our brains use habits to create mental shortcuts that might make us miss out on opportunities to reflect on and unlearn our automatic responses.

Create a habit tracker by writing down all the actions and activities you do by default over the course of a week. Pick three habits to consciously unlearn and try out a new way of working. For example, if you habitually set up meetings, see what happens when you leave it to someone else. If you habitually problem solve, try out asking for other people’s perspectives first. Testing your habits helps increase your awareness of your own actions.

Ask propelling questions

Propelling questions reset our status quo and encourage us to explore different ways of doing things. They often start with: How might we? How could I? What would happen if? These questions are designed to prevent our existing knowledge from limiting our ability to imagine new possibilities. They fast-forward us into the future and prompt positive action in the present.

To put propelling questions into practice, it’s helpful to pair up with someone else and take turns asking and answering questions. These five peer-to-peer propelling questions can get you started:

  1. Imagine it’s 2030. What three significant changes have happened in your industry?
  2. How might you divide your role between you and a robot?
  3. Which of your strengths would be most useful if your organization doubled in size?
  4. How could you transfer your talents if your industry disappeared overnight?
  5. If you were rebuilding this business tomorrow, what would you do differently?

Relearning

Relearning is recognizing that how we apply our strengths is always changing and that our potential is always a work in progress. We need to regularly reassess our abilities and how they need to be adapted for our current context. For example, collaboration remains as important as ever, but maybe you’re relearning how to do it in a hybrid world of work. Or maybe you’ve made a career change and you’re relearning what it looks like to transfer your talents to a new setting. Here are three ways to use relearning to stay nimble in the face of change.

Stretch your strengths

One of the ways to make your strengths stronger is to use them in as many different situations as possible. If you become too comfortable applying them in the same way, your development stalls. Strengths solving involves relearning how to use your strengths to offer support and solve problems outside of your day-to-day work. This could be in your networks, organizations you volunteer for, or even side projects you’re involved in. For example, one of our workshop participants is a commercial marketing director who applies her creativity not only in her day job, but also in the successful brownie business she started during lockdown.

Get fresh-eyed feedback

Looking at your skills from someone else’s perspective will help you identify opportunities to relearn. Asking for feedback can help open your eyes to your development blind spots and take back control of your growth. When your objective is to relearn, we find that presenting people with even-better questions works particularly well to provide them with the safety to share candid feedback. For example: How could I make my presentations even better? How could I make our team meetings even better? What’s one way I could do an even better job of progressing my performance?

Relearn resilience

Relearning takes resilience, and if you feel pessimistic about the progress you’re making, you might be tempted to give up. Refocusing on what’s working well can help you continue to move forward.

Try writing down three very small successes at the end of each day for two weeks. Your successes can come from your personal or professional life, and though it can be hard to spot them at first, the more you do this, the easier it gets. A very small success could include asking one person for feedback, helping a colleague prepare for a presentation, or even encouraging your toddler to eat a vegetable! At the end of two weeks, you’ll have 42 very small successes, creating the motivation and momentum to continue investing in your development, even when it feels hard.

* * *

We can’t predict how our careers will develop or what the world of work will look like in the future. Investing in our ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn helps us increase our readiness for the opportunities that change presents and our resilience to the inevitable challenges we’ll experience along the way.

Helen Tupper is the cofounder and CEO of Amazing If, a company with an ambition to make careers better for everyone

Sarah Ellis is the cofounder and CEO of Amazing If, a company with an ambition to make careers better for everyone.

https://hbr.org/2021/11/make-learning-a-part-of-your-daily-routine