A summary of this week’s best articles. Follow us on Twitter (@INTRINSICINV) for similar ongoing posts and shares.

How Much Is That Sneaker in the Window? (Bee Shapiro, @BeeShapiro, NYT)

Similar to Baseball cards, there is a strong after-market for rare sneakers. Boutique shops have opened to bring legitimacy and ensure authenticity to consumers.  Their success is drawing the attention of many people; from luxury goods providers to pricing sites similar to Kelley Blue Book for cars.

Visa says service returning to normal (BBC)

When a system that processes “£1 in £3 of all UK spending,” any delay or disruption in service can be a headache. This happened to Visa on June 1, 2018 in the UK. Customers vented their frustration online. It shows how integral credit card processing is in today’s world and how far we’ve come from relaying on physical currency.

Worried About Big Tech? Chinese Giants Make America’s Look Tame (Raymond Zhong, @zhonggg, NYT)

If you think Amazon is a force to be reckoned with in the consumer space; look at the top tech companies in China – Tencent and Alibaba. They’re quickly becoming the consumer gatekeepers. Between these two apps it covers every aspect of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Whatsapp, Uber/Lyft, Doordash/Postmates, Instacart, and Paypal! That gives incredible power to Tencent and Alibaba. There is overlap between the two companies and they battle fiercely. Their battle is evening starting to shift from the cloud to the street.

Why You Should Read Those Boring 10-K Filings (Peter R. Orszag, @porszag, Bloomberg)

The devil’s in the details. While the amount of text in 10k’s have increased greatly over the past 20 years, there importance has kept pace. “A team of economists from Harvard Business School and the University of Illinois […] find that although there is little immediate impact, modifications to the text are highly predictive of changes in the company’s stock price over the months after the report, as the implications slowly and gradually become apparent to the market.”

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