Nicholas Brenia

By Paul Tyler, April 22, 2021

A recently-released report from Adobe’s e-commerce division shows that the pandemic helped increase online sales nearly $190 million between March 2020 and this February. The headline-grabbing prediction of the first $1 trillion e-commerce year in 2022 should have sent e-commerce stocks soaring, but it didn’t. What happened here?

A great case in point is Affirm Holdings (AFRM: Nasdaq) led by a former founder of PayPal (PYPL: Nasdaq), Max Levchin. Affirm reached a high in February, but has dropped 40% since then, primarily on the basis of weaker reported sales.

Affirm’s entire business model challenges the notion of how our future wallets may look. How we pay for transactions has been driven historically by which card falls out of a wallet first. The decision to pull out cash, a debit card, or a credit card has not always reflected a rational consumer choice…

Read the full article here: https://www.benzinga.com/news/21/04/20749044/the-future-of-e-commerce-and-the-contents-of-our-new-wallets

By Bryan Ermey, April 9, 2021

….Don’t swing for the fences

If you’re worried that you may be facing muted returns in the coming years, it may be tempting to make big bets on risky assets in the hopes that the wager pays off, rather than sitting around and watching paltry returns roll in.

“Do I think that putting money in the bank, clipping coupons, and buying bonds is how this generation will build wealth? No,” says Paul Tyler, chief marketing officer at Nassau Financial Group. But neither will piling into volatile investments, he says: “Swinging for the fences is never a winning strategy in personal financial management.”

He recommends taking a diversified approach and owning a broad mix of assets that will behave differently in different market environments. That could include traditional investments, such as stocks and bonds, as well as nontraditional assets such as cryptocurrency. “You cannot at this point in time ignore digital currency, which has all the hallmarks of being an important part of our economy going forward,” he says. “Not going to put 50% of your portfolio in there. Maybe it’s 2.5% in some of these alternative assets.”

The youngest generation of investors has the advantage of understanding what sorts of companies and technologies have the power to disrupt the established order of things, says Herried, whether it’s alternative currencies such as bitcoin, or cutting-edge tech companies such as Roblox. He recommends that young investors establish a core portfolio of diversified mutual funds or ETFs before branching out with a smaller chunk of assets designated for investing in businesses with potential to pay off big down the line.

“Gen Zers have the time horizon to explore some of these investments,” he says. “If they make a mistake on one stock, there’s plenty of time to recover.”

Read the Article: https://grow.acorns.com/how-gen-z-investors-can-grow-wealth/

By Sean Teehan, April 5, 2021

Disruption is a common theme in the tech industry.

And that’s precisely the impact COVID-19 has had on Hartford’s fledgling efforts to develop a startup ecosystem — particularly on accelerator programs that have brought dozens of early-stage companies to the city in recent years with hopes they will stay and grow here.

…“We started our program saying, ‘come to Hartford, you can bump into an actuary in the coffee shop, you can ride the elevator up and meet all these people,’ ” Tyler said. “Well guess what? They’re not here [right now].”

For the rest of at least this year, Tyler said Nassau Re/Imagine will likely focus more on working with startups remotely and connecting them to companies in Hartford.

Read the Article: https://www.hartfordbusiness.com/article/covid-19-disrupts-hartfords-efforts-to-become-a-startup-magnet