Starbucks Corporation (SBUX), Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN): Eight Fascinating Reads

Happy Friday! There are more good news articles, commentaries, and analyst reports on the Web every week than anyone could read in a month. Here are eight fascinating ones I read this week.

Priorities
Josh Brown puts it all in perspective:

If you had twenty five years left to live, how much time would you spend worrying about the daily ups and downs of the stock market?

If you had twenty years left to live, how much time would you spend trying to time the stock markets and the economy and other things that are both unpredictable and completely out of your control?

If you had fifteen years left to live, how much time would you spend trying to buy or sell a specific stock at the perfect price?

If you had ten years left to live, how much time would you devote to comparing your monthly investment returns against the returns of others?

If you had five years left to live, how much of it would you spend obsessing over financial news and its unforeseeable impact on your portfolio?

Putting the customer first
Google is coming to a Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ:SBUX) near you:

Expanding its Internet services ever further, Google has teamed up with Starbucks to outfit 7,000 of its US coffee shops with faster Wi-Fi connections. The deal sees Google replace AT&T as the official Internet provider in stores, offering customers Internet speeds up to ten times faster than before. For Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ:SBUX) stores in Google Fiber-enabled areas (including Kansas, Utah, and Austin), the search giant will provide a connection that is up to 100 times faster.

Known unknowns
Howard Lindzon embraces messiness:

I don’t think things are neat. I like neat and I focus as much as I can on neat, but I know messy is around the corner.

I also don’t believe scale is easy to spot, so I don’t go around all day looking for it or chasing it. I invest in people (always messy) and I invest in patterns and the expected behavior of other people (messy squared).

Embrace some messiness. Roll your sleeves up and do some things today and tomorrow that don’t scale. You will be amazed over time how neat and scalable and profitable your life can get over time.

It’s back!
Same ol’ story at the rating agencies:

Five years after inflated credit ratings helped touch off the financial crisis, the nation’s largest ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s, is winning business again by offering more favorable ratings. S.& P. has been giving higher grades than its big rivals to certain mortgage-backed securities just as Wall Street is eagerly trying to revive the market for these investments.