Weekend Reads - Aug 30, 2025

How Wall Street Flooded the Market With Gimmick Funds; Why Know-It-All LLMs Make Second-Rate Forecasters; How Continuation Investments are Disrupting the Buyout Market; and more...

• ETF Slop: How Wall Street Flooded the Market With Gimmick Funds (ETF.com)

• Why Know-It-All LLMs Make Second-Rate Forecasters (Risk.net)

• Redefining Private Equity: How Continuation Investments are Disrupting the Buyout Market (Schroders Capital)

• Market Volatility: Another Factor Driving Private Credit’s Expansion (HPS)

• Curing Paranoia (Man)

• There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (AQR)

• Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning – Derek Muller Explains (📺 Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics)

• The One Rule That Protects My Wealth | Inside Aswath Damodaran’s Personal Portfolio (📺 Excess Returns)

• Choosing to Lose: Country Misallocation in Discretionary EM Investing (Acadian)

• In an Unsteady World, Time to (Finally) Tilt Away from U.S. Equities? (Acadian)

• What’s with All the “Stagflation” Talk? (Verus)

• The Hidden Costs of Trade Protection (Larry's Substack)

• The Economies of Russia and Ukraine in the War (The Leap Blog)

• AQR's 'Hard to Believe' Study Spurs Clash Over AI Use for Quants (Bloomberg)

• Does generative AI facilitate investor Trading? Early evidence from ChatGPT outages by Cheng et al. (JoAE)

• Do Investors Overvalue Firms with Bloated Balance Sheets? by Hirshleifer et al. (SSRN)

• Systematic Investor Sentiment and Market-Anomaly Comovement by Guo and Wu (SSRN)

• AlphaAgents: Large Language Model based Multi-Agents for Equity Portfolio Constructions by Zhao et al. (arXiv)