When you think of companies that receive a high number of technology patents, large institutional tech firms like IBM, Microsoft or Oracle may come to mind, or the new tech giants like Amazon and Google.

Merry-Go-Round, Bugle Boy, Spencer’s… These and many other brands help define the experience of going to the mall for legions of consumers old enough to recall a time when you actually had to go somewhere to buy stuff (like parachute pants and jackets adorned with meaningless zippers).

“Consultants included museum specialists Goppion, usually found protecting artwork and valuables in the world’s biggest art galleries, and the end result is crafted to perfection, moodily lit and set to crunch numbers like never before.” Yes, that’s a real line from an article in design magazine Wallpaper (See below) describing IBM’s new ‘Q System One’ quantum computer that walked the runway at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

Ever since people started buying products and services online and through digital channels, banks, payments processors, retailers and others have been trying to figure out how to best secure those transactions. One thing everyone agrees upon is that the password-and-username system is easily hackable and basically broken at this point.

No, no, not for stocks. To us, the up days feel more like vicious short-covering spasms than real buying. Conversely, the down days seem like a foreboding acknowledgement of the coming trouble emanating from our nation’s capital. The bull market we’re talking about is in crypto.

We haven’t been shy in expressing our view that Amazon’s recent sweepstakes was more about collecting data on most American cities and regions than it led on. Still, there’s an upside for the losing cities that brought their A game to the competition: muscle memory.

We’ve witnessed the rise in popularity of so-called “passive” investing in recent years, and the debate between passive versus active isn’t set to end anytime soon. However, ETFs and index funds are set for a milestone of sorts next year, as they’ll hold 50 percent of assets in 2019 if current trends hold, according to Morningstar. Currently, 48 percent of assets are passively managed.

For the past decade or so, there’s been a lot of talk about what the biggest threat to institutional banks is. First it was the fintechs that were going to “disintermediate” banks, but that threat has largely dissipated, and indeed many banks are partnering with or even outright acquiring fintechs these days.