Friday's Fast Five: Week of 7.25

The Epic Battle for AI Talent—With Exploding Offers, Secret Deals and Tears (Wall Street Journal):  The war among some of the richest companies on the planet for talent is playing out in an unprecedented frenzy of talent raids, secret deals and betrayals, leading brainy AI researchers whose minds have never been so highly valued to become as rich as NBA players and Hollywood stars. The most powerful CEOs in tech are dangling pay packages worth more than $300 million to their most prized recruits—and even that kind of money isn’t always enough to win them over.

The Double-Digit Decades (A Wealth of Common Sense): The 1980s and 1990s bull market was an all-timer, perhaps the greatest of all-time for U.S. stocks. The S&P 500 was up nearly 18% per year for two decades straight. The bull market of the 2010s and 2020s hasn’t reached those heights but we’ve still seen above-average double-digit annual returns in both decades.

The Rise and Fall of TV Sitcoms: A Statistical Analysis (Stat Significant): In 1953, an episode of I Love Lucy that featured the birth of Lucy's son was watched simultaneously by approximately 71% of American households—surpassing the viewership of Eisenhower's presidential inauguration. The sitcom, once a unifying pillar of American life and a wildly popular global export, is on the brink of extinction—with the format's boom and bust mirroring the entertainment industry's shift from mass monoculture to fragmented streaming silos.

Being Human Means Being a Bad Investor (Behavioural Investment): One of my favourite Daniel Kahneman quotes is: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it”.  It beautifully encapsulates our tendency to significantly exaggerate the importance of whatever is on our minds at any given moment. This is an issue that is particularly troublesome for investors. There is just one problem – the quote gets it wrong.

How to Use Clean Energy Tax Credits Before They Disappear (Wired): The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, provided tax credits for climate-friendly purchases ranging from heat pumps to solar arrays through 2032. That time frame has been cut to as little as a few months. For those looking to act, here is a roundup of when credits will go away.