Can You Really Trust Your Bank? It’s was the best of times to be a banker. It was the worst of times. On one hand, the period of easy money has cruised along for seven years now. Asset bubbles are inflated all around us, and banks are happy so long as they are not the greater fool. Over the last few years, many banks have raked in record profits that would not be possible in another interest rate environment....

How Normal Investors Can Use the Same Strategies as Hedge Funds In a Warren Buffett note from 2006, he credits the famous value investor Benjamin Graham as the co-creator of the first-ever hedge fund in the mid-1920s. “It involved a partnership structure, a percentage-of-profits compensation arrangement for Ben as general partner, a number of limited partners and a variety of long and short positions,” Buffett’s letter says. That means that hedge funds have been around for nearly a century – and they have almost exclusively existed as a vehicle for institutions and wealthy, private investors....

How many millions of lines of code does it take to make the modern program, web service, car, or airplane possible? The range is extraordinary: the average iPhone app has less than 50,000 lines of code, while Google’s entire code base is two billion lines for all services. And interestingly, the code behind machines such as fighter jets, popular video game engines, and even the Large Hadron Collider fall somewhere in between these two extremes....

These tech giants also have a consumer-facing aspect to their business that is front and center. With billions of people using their platforms globally, these companies leverage user data to tighten their grip even more on market share. At the same time, this data is a double-edged sword, as these same companies often find themselves in the crosshairs for mishandling personal information. Finally, all of these companies have a similar origin story: they were founded or incubated on the fertile digital grounds of the West Coast....

It’s hard to ignore a bet by a powerful investment bank such as Goldman. We are mere mortals in the pecking order, and they are supposed to be the all-knowing smart money from Wall Street. Do we buy the stock, or is it simply wiser to pass? Bank Performance Overall The folks at InterTrader have done considerable legwork to dive deep into the data on investment bank recommendations made in 2015....

By 2020, there will be 50 billion devices connected to the internet, and many of these devices will be tracking the health data of individuals. This will empower consumers in an exciting way, but it will also fundamentally shift how healthcare companies work and interact with their customers. Today’s infographic comes to us from Publicis Health and it is the introduction to a seven-part series about the future of healthcare, and how companies will have to adapt to stay relevant....

However, that fact doesn’t tell the whole story. Trends around beer consumption are anything but uniform, and the industry is evolving rapidly thanks to the craft beer boom in cities throughout the country. Beer Consumption by State Today’s infographic looks at regional beer consumption, as well as trends over the past half-decade. Pints of Interest Beer is still the most popular alcoholic beverage in America, though that demand is not spread equally....

By the last count, there are 188 types of these fallible mental shortcuts in existence, and they constantly impede our ability to make the best decisions about our careers, our relationships, and for building wealth over time. Biases That Plague Investors In today’s infographic from StocksToTrade, we dive deeper into five of these cognitive biases – specifically the ones that really seem to throw investors and traders for a loop....

That’s because the consensus view from both economists and economic historians has been that measures like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which triggered a trade war during the Great Depression, greatly exacerbated circumstances that were already quite dire. It’s common for tariff increases to be countered by retaliatory measures, and this can often translate to lower levels of international trade and decreased economic growth across the board. During the period of 1929 to 1934, according to the U....

It’s Official: Bitcoin was the Top Performing Currency of 2015 The Money Project is an ongoing collaboration between Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals that seeks to use intuitive visualizations to explore the origins, nature, and use of money. For most investors, the major story of 2015 was the expectation and eventual fulfillment of a rate hike, signalling the start of tightening monetary policy in the United States. This policy is divergent to those of other major central banks, and this has translated into considerable strength and momentum for the U....

Cities become “expensive” due to a variety of factors such as high demand for housing, a concentration of high-paying businesses and industries, and a high standard of living. Additionally, factors such as taxes, transportation costs, and availability of goods and services can also contribute to the overall cost of living in global cities. The infographic above uses data from EIU to rank the world most and least expensive cities to live in....

Here’s one image based on this principle. It comes from NASA, and is a composite made from 400 separate satellite images from 2012: How Are These Lights Powered? But what if we could differentiate, by “shutting off” lights that are powered by certain electricity sources? Today’s visualizations come from a nifty interactive website put together by GoCompare.com, and they breakdown the world’s electricity by source: fossil fuels, renewables, or nuclear fission....

Increasingly, investors are seeing both the financial and social imperative for sustainable investing. In particular, the rapid growth of green bonds—a fixed income investment that is designed to raise funds for the climate or environment—is booming. The above infographic from Raconteur navigates the growing green bond market against the backdrop of the broader ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing shift. Gathering Steam By the end of 2020, $45 trillion in assets will adhere to sustainable practices, including ESG principles....

They can take many forms, from the venom of a snake or spider to the neurotoxins produced by certain types of algae or microbes. In the infographic above, we look at some common biotoxins in the natural world and rank them based on how deadly they are to an average 70 kg (154 lb) human being. Ranking Biotoxins on a Toxic Scale A basic concept in toxicology is that “only the dose makes the poison”....

The top producing nations each produce billions of kilograms of coffee beans that find their way into the hands of eager consumers. According to the International Coffee Organization, a total of 169.6 million 60-kilogram bags of coffee were produced worldwide in 2020. So, why does the world universally love coffee so much? For The Love of Coffee As most coffee lovers would tell you, drinking coffee is a complex and nuanced experience—there’s the rich aroma, the comforting warmth, and the loveliness of the ritual of sitting down with a fresh cup....

Millions of jobs will be destroyed, but many jobs will also be simultaneously created in the process as well. For those in the workforce – or for those just joining it for the first time – the big question is: what skills are needed to navigate this monumental shift in the economy? How will humans create value in an increasingly automated world? The Human Touch Today’s infographic comes to us from Guthrie Jensen, and it summarizes the skills needed in 2020 and beyond to take advantage of the shifting landscape of work....

Both Alphabet and Facebook have carefully worked at crafting their public images. Most people see these companies as forward-looking tech companies that are shaping our future through high-flying initiatives like Google X or Oculus VR. They put money into big moonshots that could potentially change the world, and their actions are closely followed by people in and outside of the technology sector. But, despite these other initiatives and some diligent messaging, make no mistake – both Alphabet and Facebook are media companies that get their money from one source....

In this graphic, we used the Forbes real-time billionaire list to highlight the most financially successful Black people, and the source(s) of their wealth. Black Billionaires, Ranked The data is as of February 24, 2021, and includes bi/multi racial individuals with Black ancestry. Altogether, there are 15 Black billionaires with a combined wealth of $48.9 billion. Here is the how the full list breaks down: Aliko Dangote is the richest Black billionaire, and has held the title since 2013....

Our thirst for exploration has brought whole nations together to create more advanced technologies─all in the pursuit of discovering the outer reaches of the universe. Today’s infographic from ProcureAM highlights the exciting journey humans have taken into outer space, and the economic boom across industries as a result of this quest for discovery. With an ever-expanding universe, how far have we gone? Our Connection with Outer Space Humans have been fascinated with space for millennia, using the planets and stars to navigate, keep time, and discover scientific facts about the universe....

The world is not getting any bigger but the human population continues to grow, consuming more and more resources and altering the very environment we rely on. In 2020, the amount of human-made mass, or anthropogenic mass, exceeded for the first time the dry weight (except for water and fluids) of all life on Earth, including humans, animals, plants, fungi, and even microorganisms. In this infographic based on a study published in Nature, we break down the composition of all human-made materials and the rate of their production....