I’ve got a lot on my plate. I always do. Presumably, I like it this way because I’d change things if I didn’t. And yes, that’s continuous fodder for conversations with my therapist and with Amy.

I have always tried to ignore the macro, especially short-term dynamics, in the context of my work. I collect a lot of data and like to be well informed. I get this data from lots of different inputs. I regularly play around with the volume on the inputs as well as try different inputs.

One of my key inputs is reading books. I read 50 to 100 books a year (the number seems to be steadily increasing as I get older.) It’s a great joy of mine to sit and read, especially stuff friends recommend to me. I read across all categories and am game to try anything. And I’m willing to quit something I’m not enjoying.

A week ago I read Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. While it had a few annoying characteristics (I didn’t love his forced acronym for the BUMMER machine), the insights from it were right on the money. I let it roll around in my head the past week as I considered my own behavior over the last six months.

Basically, I’ve turned down the input knobs on almost all real-time social media inputs to 0. I no longer look at Facebook or Twitter. I never really got Facebook, so I was a Twitter guy, but since mid-2016 engaging with Twitter has simply made me anxious, upset, jangly, and distracted. By the beginning of this year, I was broadcast only – sending out links via Buffer when I saw something I found interesting – but that’s about it.

Until a few months ago, I still had a bunch of inputs turned on. I had a Daily folder, which I’ve opened first thing in the morning for over a decade. The contents would periodically change, but it was always something like RSS Reader, some daily reads, Hacker News, my LinkedIn messages, or Google News.

I deleted my Daily folder a few months ago from my browser bar. The inputs were distracting me instead of informing me.

I’ve been using Sanebox for two years to filter out all the noise from my email. I’ve effectively unsubscribed (or – in Sanebox terms, blackholed) thousands of email newsletters. The ones I want to read each day go into my SaneNews folder, so I don’t read them once a day. The number in that folder is now very small and don’t include anything beyond stuff from the tech industry anymore.

While I haven’t deleted my social media accounts, I have turned all the inputs way down. For work, I’m very focused on my existing portfolio, Foundry Group business, and my writing. Beyond that, I’m spending my time with books and with people.

I feel different than I did six months ago. It’ll be interesting to see how I feel in six more months.

Also published on Medium.

Over the weekend, 9to5Mac, an Apple blog, posted a video of what looks to be physical representations of this year's upcoming iPhone models.

The short video shows two physical iPhone mockups. One looks like a larger version of the iPhone X, and the other looks like what enthusiasts have been calling the iPhone "9 " — a less expensive model with an edge-to-edge 6.1-inch screen.

What they depict lines up pretty closely with what analysts and journalists expect from the 2018 iPhone lineup, which will probably be launched in September. There's one difference: these phones don't turn on. There's a hole through the dummies in the video.

Apple watchers are expecting three new iPhones this year: One that looks like the iPhone X but with updated components, a super-sized version of the iPhone X, and a less expensive iPhone with an edge-to-edge LCD screen and facial recognition that costs between $649 and $749.

Check out the dummies:

Here's what's going on. These units are called "dummies." They typically don't work — they're simply a plastic hunk that looks like a future iPhone. Some are 3D-printed, and some are molded like a consumer product.

What these dummies suggest is that there is a CAD file or other digital description of this year's iPhones that has been leaked or created based on leaks. Two people who have seen a file describing one of this year's supposed iPhones told Business Insider that it leaked in early June.

The iPhone design is locked down by June ahead of an expected September launch, so people inside Apple and at Apple's partner factories know what the iPhones are going to look like. Factories have already gone through design and some production testing, and are preparing to ramp up to mass production in order build tens of millions of phones by September.

These dummies are not confirmed to be accurate; Apple does not comment on future products. But Business Insider bought a dummy from Ebay last year in August for $45 that closely matched nearly every dimension on the iPhone X that was announced a month later.

It's a little bit unclear what the purpose of the dummies is beyond being cool. Some case manufacturers use them to make sure they have cases ready to sell the day the new iPhones go on sale. In the above video, there are cases on the dummy phones. On Ebay, sometimes the seller suggests they can be used as a stand-in for real phones at a retail store.

Whether the dummies shared with 9to5Mac by Shaimizrachi end up being accurate remains to be seen. But dummies are now a core part of the iPhone rumor cycle, and they also look way better than a random iPhone part in a YouTube video. In the past few years, dummies have popped up in July and August before the September iPhone launch.

Since 2012, Apple has unveiled its latest iPhone in September. Typically, the new iPhone is available to preorder a few days after Apple's announcement.

Here's the recent history:

2012: iPhone 5 was announced on Wednesday, September 12, and started shipping on Friday, September 21.

2013: iPhone 5S was announced on Wednesday, September 10, and started shipping on Friday, September 20.

2014: iPhone 6 was announced on Tuesday, September 9, and started shipping on Friday, September 19.

2015: iPhone 6S was announced on Wednesday, September 9, and started shipping on Friday, September 25.

2016: iPhone 7 was announced on Wednesday, September 7, and started shipping on September 16.

2017: iPhone 8 and iPhone X were announced together on Tuesday, September 12. The iPhone 8 started shipping on September 22. In a change from previous years, iPhone X started shipping on November 3, almost two months after the announcement.

There is a dearth of middlemen in the crypto investing world, and it is causing a big headache for crypto investors and is likely keeping out billions in mainstream institutional money.

On Wall Street, middlemen called brokers sit between institutional investors, like a hedge fund or money manager, and exchanges and other trading venues. Such operations are hard to come by in the crypto world because the barriers to entry are high.

As a result, if a crypto investor wants to trade coins, the investor must keep a balance on an exchange. Michael Moro, the head of the over-the-counter trader Genesis Global Trading, says this translates into illiquidity and disparities in pricing that can eat into profits.

"The better option from a market-structure perspective is to have a prime broker sitting in the middle where all you have to do is wire one account and you can trade across all of them simultaneously," Moro said.

Several companies in crypto are looking at providing so-called prime services, meaning a broker would extend credit to clients so they could trade across exchanges without depositing funds themselves. The move comes as mainstream Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs are starting to dip their toes into trading crypto products and are looking for market safeguards and infrastructure to which they're accustomed.

The crypto startup SFOX is interested in offering prime services in the future, people familiar with the matter tell Business Insider, and is talking to outside lawyers about a potential offering. Digital Gamma, a crypto company, is also working on prime services, a representative told Business Insider.

Coinbase, the crypto exchange, is looking to provide broker-related services.

Mike Belshe, the founder of BitGo, a crypto custody company, said his firm might one day enter the business but was more interested in perfecting its custody products.

The potential introduction of prime services into the crypto world is a bit ironic. Bitcoin, the largest digital currency on the market, was founded in the aftermath of the financial crisis as an alternative peer-to-peer financial system to Wall Street that would render middlemen useless.

Still, Colleen Sullivan, the head of the crypto venture firm CMT Digital, said the lack of a prime broker was among the bigger issues holding back the crypto space. Having to self-finance at each exchange opens the firm to above-average risk on Wall Street. She described the lack of prime services in crypto as CMT Digital's "biggest pain point."

"Without a prime broker, trading firms are directly subject to events that an exchange may suffer like hacks, regulatory issues, operational issues, technology issues (and many more) — all of which may lead to loss of the trading firm's cash and coin," she said.

Prime brokers arose in the equities markets in the early 1990s, about the same time the hedge fund industry started to take off.

According to the banking research firm Coalition, the 12 largest banks collectively brought in $4.9 billion from their prime-broker units in the first quarter of 2018, the highest level in three years.

In crypto, there's also lucrative opportunity, says BitGo's Belshe. But Wall Street firms are less likely to get into the business than smaller crypto firms because the market isn't yet large enough to justify the risk. The entire market for digital currencies stands at $235 billion, while the stock market is worth $30 trillion in the US.

As for crypto firms, they have their own difficulties, said CMT Digital's Sullivan. A firm requires a large balance sheet to offer prime services, and that's something many startups don't have. It would also require a firm to connect to each exchange a client wants to trade on.

"Many exchanges in the US and overseas are largely unregulated," she said. "So the prime may not even be able to be counterparty to certain exchanges depending on what the regulatory regime the prime is subject to."

Kiran Nagaraj, KPMG's leader of cryptocurrency services, said large institutional firms had been sitting on the sidelines of the crypto market because they expected white-glove service.

Aside from traditional prime services, brokers need to support institutions on crypto-specific issues such as managing crypto forks — when a crypto splits into two — for them to enter the market in a serious way. Big investors, Nagaraj says, don't want to be concerned with the technicals.

"They're in the investment business," he said. "They can't hold their own private key. Maybe you'll find some that'll do it, but they are looking for market exposure. They don't want to deal with the operations."

Reuters

The same tented assembly line that helped Tesla finally break its Model 3 production goal on Sunday could also be working against it, a Wall Street analyst warned Tuesday.

George Galliers, an analyst at Evercore ISI, said in a note to clients out Tuesday that Tesla’s extra assembly line — constructed in a tent next to its main Fremont, California factory and known by the company as GA4 — could be a long-term risk to Tesla's reputation.

"We understand that Tesla viewed GA4 as an economic way to accelerate production and delivery of Model 3, thereby resulting in incremental revenues and operating leverage on those parts of the production process that precede General Assembly," Galliers said.

"From a business perspective, we see sense in this. However, we also see merit in the counterargument that, if cash is not an immediate concern and GA3 is close to 5k a week today, the company should have waited rather than incur incremental capex to erect what appears to be a fairly primitive, and potentially temporary, facility. A facility which also has the potential to damage Tesla’s reputation as an innovative and advanced manufacturer, in the eyes of the consumer."

Evercore has a $287 price target for shares of Tesla, 14% below where shares are currently trading. The stock initially popped Monday following CEO Elon Musk's tweet suggesting the electric-car maker had reached its goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 sedans in a week. It closed down 2.3%, however, once investors digested the full deliveries report, which showed Tesla missed Wall Street's consensus for total vehicle deliveries.

Like many of his sell-side peers including Barclays, CFRA Research, and Edmunds, Evercore doubts Tesla's ability to maintain the 5,000 per week rate going forward.

"We don’t believe any investor sees 5k+ as a sustainable run-rate over the coming 3-4 weeks," Galliers writes.

"Instead, it is seen as a burst rate. Based off the limited photographs/material available, does not appear cutting edge, modern or, ultimately, efficient to our eyes. Indeed, it looks like the set-up we would expect from an early start-up in an emerging market or in a developed market during a time of conflict. This seems to go against the very grain of Tesla’s reputation as a technologically advanced company and the concept of 'the Machine that builds the Machine'."

Tesla has risen 4.5% since the beginning of 2018. Musk, meanwhile, has warned multiple times of an upcoming short-squeeze. Still, investors shorting the stock — or betting its price will go down — haven't backed off. Telsa remains the most shorted US equity, with $12.04 billion riding against it, up from $11.6 last month, according to data from financial-analytics firm S3 Partners. 

Do you have information about Tesla's vehicle production? Get in touch with the reporter confidentially here.

Markets Insider

I only spent two days with AOL cofounder Steve Case and his team in May, but they were virtually nonstop. Each time, we were part of the biggest show in town.

I joined the last two days of the latest Rise of the Rest bus tour, as it passed through Chattanooga, Tennessee and Louisville, Kentucky. It's an initiative Case has been running through his Washington, DC-based venture capital firm, Revolution, for the last four years.

In each tour, Case and his team meet with the city's power brokers and end the day with a pitch competition with a $100,000 prize. This past tour was the first to draw that money from a $150 million seed fund Revolution raised last year, featuring more than 30 high-profile investors serving as limited partners who give their money but not their counsel. They include Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio. Case put JD Vance, "Hillbilly Elegy" author and former Valley investor, in charge of the fund.

After spending time on the tour, I realized it's a spectacle — and that's essential to drawing attention to the entrepreneur communities in these cities. The real value, however, comes from the relationships that last beyond the day. As Case told me, "Most interesting things are not actually what happens the day we're here, it's what happens in the months before we arrive and the months and hopefully years after we leave."

Here's what it was like.

It's one of those things that make soccer such an intense and nail-biting sport — penalty shootout. But are penalty kicks actually fair and how likely is it that the goalie can successfully block a penalty kick? With the help of statistics and economist, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, who studied more than 11,000 penalty kicks, we take a look at why penalty shootouts are so unfair to the goalies and what can be done about it. Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: 0.4 seconds. That's the time it takes you to blink. It's also about how long goalkeepers have to save a penalty kick or fail trying. And it's certainly not enough time for a goalie to react and respond. So goalies can't solely rely on their speed and agility to save a penalty kick. Instead they have to pretty much guess which direction to go and rely on either luck or game theory.

Game theory is a popular strategy in economics where the outcome of a situation relies more on how well you predict your opponent's actions than how you perform your own. So since the goalie has no choice but to guess, they're better off guessing logically than randomly. That's where economists come in.

Ignacio Palacios-Huerta: I would like to know what you do in the last 80 penalty kicks you faced? Do you have any tendencies? What does this guy do against right-footed kickers versus left-footed kickers?

Narrator: That's economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta. He studied over 11,000 penalty kicks, and in 2008 during the UEFA Champions League Final, it paid off, sort of. It was Manchester United against Chelsea. The game came down to a penalty shootout which was the perfect opportunity for Chelsea to put Huerta's advice into action.

Along with several pointers Huerta had given Chelsea's goalie a key insight about Manchester United star Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo would almost certainly kick the ball to the right if he paused on the run-up. And the advice worked. Ronaldo indeed paused and indeed kicked the ball to the right. Chelsea's goalie followed Huerta's advice and made the save. Ultimately Manchester United won the game, but despite Chelsea's loss, it was clear that economists and statisticians can help even the odds when it comes to penalty kicks.

Because otherwise, it's a crap shoot for the goalie. In 2014 for example, FiveThirtyEight calculated that 72.5% of penalties in World Cup history went in. For all competitions worldwide, it's even higher. And when you take a closer look, it's no wonder. Human response time takes roughly 1/10 of a second to kick in. The average kicker kicks a 70 mile per hour ball, which means the goalie won't even register the ball's direction until it's about 25 feet away. It will take him another .5 to .7 seconds to react and reach for the ball, but by that point, it's all over.

Now the goalie can improve the odds if they start to move before the ball is even kicked, but the goalie still has to basically guess a side and just go for it. So if time is the goalie's enemy, maybe we should just move the penalty kicker further back. But for now, economists are a goalie's best friend when it comes to stopping penalty kicks, and turns out, Huerta is helping a team in the 2018 World Cup, though he wouldn't tell us who.