Category Archives: Markets

Michelle Obama Launches Health Food Company for Kids

Consumerism, Lifestyle, Markets

Former First Lady Michelle Obama recently launched PLEZi Nutrition, a healthy food and beverage company which aims to offer “healthier, great-tasting products” to kids. Obama, who is the co-founder and strategic partner of PLEZi Nutrition, has experience with trying to get children to make healthier choices. As First Lady, she created the Let’s Move Campaign which encouraged kids to engage in physical activity and eat more fruits and vegetables. She helped to pass the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2010, which increased the nutritional value of school lunches across the country.

PLEZi Nutrition’s first product is a fruit juice for kids called PLEZi, which contains significantly less sugar than the leading fruit juices on the market. The company stated that they have plans to begin selling other items in the near future, which focus on “Lowering sugar content and lowering sweetness to help adjust kids’ palates to crave less sweetness”.

Obama is concerned by the rising rates of obesity and nutrition-related illnesses in children in the United States. She said, “I’ve learned that on this issue, if you want to change the game, you can’t just work from the outside. You’ve got to get inside—you’ve got to find ways to change the food and beverage industry itself”.

Millenial Values Changing Investment Patterns

Markets, Millenials, Real Estate, , ,

Growing up in Sydney, Australia, Shenal Harakh learned that real estate was the key to a prosperous financial future. For an immigrant family from India, it wasn’t a bad model: Real estate values Down Under have exploded in recent decades, with the median price for a single-family home jumping from A$111,524 in 1995 to A$871,749 at the end of 2020.

For the 28-year-old Harakh, however, real estate investing left her itching for “action.” Three years ago, the then-anthropology student at Australian National University decided to diversify into the stock market. The move was a prodigious one: In 2020 she turned a 174 percent return in addition to 27 percent and 14 percent returns (respectively) on the Bell Direct and Stake platforms, according to the Australian Financial Review.

Harakh’s investment strategy appears to be a guidebook on Investing for Millenials. Her LinkedIn page says her investments focus on “cultivat(ing) meaningful connections and content where you can see your universe of interests as well as those of others, but still have the ability to separate what’s private, public, or visible to specific contacts and know there’s more to your network than meets the eye.

“As we spend more time online and creating virtual connections, it’s important for us to be able to express the complexity and interconnected nature of our lives,” she writes.

At the same time, she is cautious to warn that market activists must be careful, and that it isn’t for everyone. “Trading is addictive,” she told the AFN. “And the last thing you want to do is lose everything because of this addiction.”