Good Morning,

U.S. equities closed higher in volatile session on Friday after Donald Trump took a protectionist tone in his first speech as president.

"We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs," Trump said after being sworn in. "Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength. I will fight for you with every breath in my body and I will never ever let you down.”

Our Take

It was a very populist speech. But what were you expecting? No Trump isn’t normal but that’s sort of the point as he spoke to the Heartland appealing directly to those who voted for him. It was vintage Trump and quite frankly it was what many in the United States needed to hear. Perhaps if businesses and consumers truly believe that Trump will “make America great again” the rhetoric will become reality as wallets open and corporate war chests are put to work.

Sentiment is powerful and often precedes outcome. The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated. The things you say in the long run can have a way of creating the future.

The great leader respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others. By acting regally, by tempting others to become confident in their powers, in their country and in themselves they make themselves and their subjects seem destined to wear a crown.

Could Trump be powerful enough to catalyze rhetoric into reality?

Thought of the Week

"Be royal in your own fashion: act like a king to be treated like one.” - Robert Greene

Stories and Ideas of Interest

U.S. investor optimism is highest since crisis as Trump era dawns. It's been a month since the post-election rally in U.S. stocks stalled, but to hear high net worth investors tell it, there's only blue sky ahead as Donald Trump takes office….
That awkward moment when the world’s richest people have the same amount of money as half the world. Eight billionaires from around the globe are as rich as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world's population.

Lifelong learning is becoming an economic imperative. Interesting piece from the Economist suggesting that technological change demands stronger and more continuous connections between education and employment. The faint outlines of such a system are now emerging. We are moving towards in which schools are places that you may return to several times over a lifetime in order to train for several different careers.
Trump’s nationalization via Twitter. Here’s a question: When is a company considered privately owned? There’s ownership, and there’s control. If a company’s shareholders and executives don’t have control over the day-to-day operations of their organization -- if the government calls them up and tells them what to do -- is it really private?
AI pioneer wants to build the Renaissance machine of the future. Juergen Schmidhuber taught a computer to park a car. He’s also showing that same machine how to trade stocks and detect flaws in steel production. Unrelated as these tasks may appear, Schmidhuber thinks a seemingly random training regimen is key to creating artificial intelligence that can solve any problem.

Can Snapchat’s culture of secrecy survive an IPO? Last September, Snapchat employees read a report about a leaked commercial touting a new product—a pair of glasses for shooting videos. They felt emboldened to ask their bosses: Are these Spectacles glasses really from us? It seemed plausible. Paparazzi had photographed Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel wearing similar frames months earlier. Interesting piece chronicling the rise of a company in which employees are last to know.

Mathematical model reveals the patterns of how innovations arise. The MIT technology review suggests that the work could lead to a new approach to the study of what is possible, and how it follows from what already exists.

Move over coders- physicists will soon rule Silicon Valley. Interesting piece from Wired suggesting that structurally and technologically, the things that just about every internet company needs to do are more and more suited to the skill set of a physicist. Stay interdisciplinary.

All the best for a productive week,

Logos LP