Before Facebook Deal, Instagram's Talks With Twitter - NYTimes.com

Before Facebook Deal, Instagram's Talks With Twitter - NYTimes.com:

This one will be talked about for years:

"Facebook’s deal to buy Instagram for $1 billion stunned Wall Street and Silicon Valley when it was announced in April. But executives at Twitter had an additional reason to be surprised. Instagram’s founders “held several meetings as late as March with top Twitter executives,” The New York Times’s Nick Bilton reports. “The sides had verbally agreed weeks earlier on a price for Instagram of $525 million in cash and Twitter shares,”"

Interestingly the deal closed for about $735m down from the $1billion that was based on pre-IPO valuations. 

Irving Fisher, the First Celebrity Finance Professor - Bloomberg

Irving Fisher, the First Celebrity Finance Professor - Bloomberg:

A history lesson on the man behind the "Fisher effect"

"Fisher developed revolutionary insights into financial theory that are still invoked today. He explained that the market interest rate coincides with the human tendency to discount an uncertain future when compared with the more pressing present. He argued that we distribute our present and expected future wealth over the consumption decisions we make now and in the future. In doing so, he anticipated the life-cycle hypothesis that would demonstrate, half a century later, why we save and how we consume."

Take the money: Why we make better financial decisions for strangers than family

Take the money: Why we make better financial decisions for strangers than family

This one should not really surprise anyone and is essentially the logic behind my recent test question of "what is the role of a financial planner in the face of investors prone to behavioral biases".

"They found participants were more likely to select a smaller immediate reward than delay for a larger pay-off both for themselves and for beneficiaries they were more closely related to. The decisions got progressively less impulsive and steadily more rational as the family connection became more distant. The most rational economic choices were made on behalf of complete strangers.

The study, published in the online journal PLOS ONE, is the first to show that decisions taken on behalf of others are affected systematically by the closeness of the relationship...."