Apple Inc. (AAPL), Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (WMT) and Eight Fascinating Reads

Revenge of the nerds
This is an old article, but one of the best I’ve seen on what went wrong with Wall Street:

“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” …

“Two things happened. One is that the amount of money that could be made on Wall Street with hedge fund and private equity operations became just mind-blowing. At the same time, college was getting so expensive that people from reasonably prosperous families were graduating with huge debts. So even the smart guys went to Wall Street, maybe telling themselves that in a few years they’d have so much money they could then become professors or legal-services lawyers or whatever they’d wanted to be in the first place. That’s when you started reading stories about the percentage of the graduating class of Harvard College who planned to go into the financial industry or go to business school so they could then go into the financial industry. That’s when you started reading about these geniuses from M.I.T. and Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in physics went to Wall Street to calculate arbitrage odds.”

Backfired
The Wall Street Journal writes about innovation backfiring at The Procter & Gamble Company (NYSE:PG) :

For years, consumer-product makers could count on extra sales from shoppers who poured in too much detergent with every load. The phenomenon became more pronounced when manufacturers rolled out increasingly concentrated detergent.

But the bubble burst when P&G introduced its new laundry product — Tide Pods capsules — which fixed the amount of detergent used per wash and ushered in the era of “unit dose” products. Total U.S. sales of laundry detergents fell 2.1% in the 12 months to March.

Pricing power
Calculated Risk shows nationwide apartment vacancy rates now at the lowest level in more than a decade:

Information superhighway
Via Wonkblog, here’s a 1995 video on something new called the “Internet.”

Enjoy your weekend.

The article 8 Fascinating Reads originally appeared on Fool.com.

Morgan Housel owns shares of Procter & Gamble. The Motley Fool recommends Apple and Procter & Gamble. The Motley Fool owns shares of Apple.

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