What We're Reading

So the year begins and with it a new presidency. Everyone has ideas how best to invest your money. Simple indexing is the least expensive way to manage capital; no, smart beta is superior; this year we are told (once again) will be when active stock-picking makes its triumphant return.

Regardless of how you choose to allocate your assets, there is another way; a much better way; a method that cannot fail in its brilliance and simplicity. Go with the POTUS indexes.

Direct your attention to the relentless tweeting of the man who soon will be president. There is valuable information in those 140 characters that can move markets and alter perceptions of corporate fundamentals. This has real alpha-generating possibilities. Whoever is managing your favorite 401(k), hedge fund or trading account should take note.

To help you make sense of this, we have created two indexes based on Donald Trump's tweet and other pre-presidential utterances.

Before we get to the specific stocks, I want to o

Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, warns us of a insidious and pervasive new form of mind control: search results.

That’s right, search results. And not just any search results: Google search results. Since 2013 Epstein and colleagues have conducted a number of experiments in the US and India to determine whether search results can impact people’s political opinions.

Epstein points out that about 50 percent of our clicks go to the top two items on the first page of results, and more than 90 percent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed. And of course Google, which dominates the search business, decides which of the billions of web pages to include in our search results, and it decides how to rank them.

But surely, Epstein thought, a top search result would have only a small impact on a person’s political choices. Not so! To Epstein’s surpri