Joseph Fink (Welcome to Night Vale (Welcome to Night Vale, #1))
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The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke, and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world. Why not? Because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind.
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Malcolm Gladwell (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking)
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In experiments at Baylor University where people were given Coke and Pepsi in unmarked cups and then hooked up to a brain scanner, the device clearly showed a certain number of them preferred Pepsi while tasting it. When those people were told they were drinking Pepsi, a fraction of them, the ones who had enjoyed Coke all their lives, did something unexpected. The scanner showed their brains scrambling the pleasure signals, dampening them. They then told the experimenter afterward they had preferred Coke in the taste tests.
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David McRaney (You Are Not So Smart)
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The only biodiversity we’re going to have left is Coke versus Pepsi. We’re landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time.
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Chuck Palahniuk (Lullaby)
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As a young child I had Santa and Jesus all mixed up. I could identify Coke or Pepsi with just one sip, but I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house? Had a good little girl somewhere in the world not received the doll he’d promised her, making the father angry?” (p.3)
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Augusten Burroughs (You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas)
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As a young child I had Santa and Jesus all mixed up. I could identify Coke or Pepsi with just one sip, but I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house? Had a good little girl somewhere in the world not received the doll he'd promised her, making the father angry?
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Augusten Burroughs (You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas)
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Charlie turned out to be a blue-ink person, while I was exclusively black. FYI for nonwriters: blue versus black ink is an essential identity issue. Much like Coke versus Pepsi, or the Beatles versus the Stones, or college-ruled notebooks versus regular. You can be one kind of person or the other, but not both.
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Katherine Center (The Rom-Commers)
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This drink. This drink will fuck you from your gums to your guts, but cold enough, the sugar and fizz will provide a blip, just long enough, to stop you opening a vein. Coke. Or Pepsi — doesn’t matter.
This phone. This phone will connect you to people everywhere, except for where you are, and sever you from God forever. Apple.
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Russell Brand (Revolution)
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Montagues and Capulets, French and English, Whig and Tory, Airbus and Boeing, Pepsi and Coke, Serb and Muslim, Christian and Saracen – we are irredeemably tribal creatures. The neighbouring or rival group, however defined, is automatically an enemy. Argentinians and Chileans hate each other because there is nobody else nearby to hate.
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Matt Ridley (The Origins of Virtue (Penguin Press Science))
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Not only the difference between Coke and Pepsi, but Wise potato chips and Utz, Little Debbie’s and Hostess. Duron and the Hechinger store brand of spray paint.
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Laura Lippman (The Sugar House (Tess Monaghan #5))
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Pepsi. A refreshing drink. A soft tone playing when you wake up, but then it is gone and you don’t know if you dreamed it. A hallway glimpsed in the back of your refrigerator, but when you look again it is gone. The recurring feeling that your shower is losing faith in you. Desperation. Hunger. Starving, not literally, but still. That hallway again, lined with doors that you know you can open. Your fridge is empty. You haven’t left your home in days, and yet you come and go. This isn’t food. What are you eating? Pepsi: Drink Coke. The
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Joseph Fink (Welcome to Night Vale (Welcome to Night Vale, #1))
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Alex took a sip. It wasn’t Coke. It wasn’t even Pepsi. He recognized the over-sweet, slightly cloying taste of supermarket cola and wished he’d asked for water.
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Anthony Horowitz (Stormbreaker (Alex Rider, #1))
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In 1978, the typical teenage boy in the United States drank about seven ounces of soda every day; today he drinks nearly three times that amount, deriving 9 percent of his daily caloric intake from soft drinks. Soda consumption among teenaged girls has doubled within the same period, reaching an average of twelve ounces a day. A significant number of teenage boys are now drinking five or more cans of soda every day. Each can contains the equivalent of about ten teaspoons of sugar. Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Dr Pepper also contain caffeine. These sodas provide empty calories and have replaced far more nutritious beverages in the American diet. Excessive soda consumption in childhood can lead to calcium deficiencies and a greater likelihood of bone fractures. Twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda; now they drink twice as much soda as milk. Soft-drink consumption has also become commonplace among American toddlers. About one-fifth of the nation’s one- and two-year-olds now drink soda.
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Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal)
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Practically every drug prescribed for psychosis, from Donald’s time until now, has been a variation on Thorazine or clozapine. Thorazine and its successors became known as “typical” neuroleptic drugs, while clozapine and its heirs were “atypical,” the Pepsi to Thorazine’s Coke.
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Robert Kolker (Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family)
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Before we go any further, can we all just admit that junior high sucks eggs? I have never met a person who said, “Man. Seventh grade was the best.” And if I did, I would not want them in my life. Like a person who wears Crocs on purpose, or prefers Pepsi over Coke, I don’t need that kind of delusional idiocy in my life.
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Tyler Merritt (I Take My Coffee Black: Reflections on Tupac, Musical Theater, Faith, and Being Black in America)
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All the positive associations the subjects had with Coca-Cola—its history, logo, color, design, and fragrance; their own childhood memories of Coke, Coke’s TV and print ads over the years, the sheer, inarguable, inexorable, ineluctable, emotional Coke-ness of the brand—beat back their rational, natural preference for the taste of Pepsi. Why? Because emotions are the way in which our brains encode things of value, and a brand that engages us emotionally—think Apple, Harley-Davidson, and L’Oréal, just for starters—will win every single time.
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Martin Lindstrom (Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy)
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Most broadly, the PFC chooses between conflicting options—Coke or Pepsi; blurting out what you really think or restraining yourself; pulling the trigger or not. And often the conflict being resolved is between a decision heavily driven by cognition and one driven by emotions. Once it has decided, the PFC sends orders via projections to the rest of the frontal cortex, sitting just behind it. Those neurons then talk to the “premotor cortex,” sitting just behind it, which then passes it to the “motor cortex,” which talks to your muscles. And a behavior ensues.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
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Well, it’s the inevitable “Coke versus Pepsi” dichotomy as to which is more important, which influences the other more in terms of our actions. And of course it turns out that, as with most dichotomies of behavior, it’s a false one. They’re utterly intertwined, and intertwined on a neurobiological level. For example, if you think of something terrifying that happened to you long ago, emotional parts of your brain activate and you secrete stress hormones. Or if you have an aroused emotion—you’re in an agitated, frightened state—and suddenly you think and reason in a way that’s imprudent and ridiculous. We often make terrible decisions when we’re aroused. The two parts are equally intertwined.
We assume that as creatures with big cortexes, reason is at the core of most of our decision making. And an awful lot of work has shown that far more often than we’d like to think, we make our decisions based on implicit emotional, automatic reflexes. We make them within milliseconds. Parts of the brain that are marinated in emotion and hormones are activating long, long before the more cortical rational parts activate. And often what we believe is rational thinking is, instead, our cognitive selves playing catch-up, trying to rationalize the notion that our emotional instincts are perfectly logical and make wonderful sense.
We can manipulate the emotional, the automatic, the implicit, the subterranean aspects of our brains unawares, and it changes our decisions, and then we come up with highfalutin explanations—that I did what I just did because of some philosopher I read freshman year. No, actually it’s because of this manipulation that just occurred.
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Robert M. Sapolsky
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What the hell is that?” Bethany Anne was pointing at the plastic Pepsi bottle in his hand. Todd Jenkins looked down at his Pepsi and decided to play along. “A Coke?” “Hell no that isn’t a Coke! That is the vile filth from a disgusting dimension. How did that shit end up in my fridge?
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Michael Anderle (Bite This (The Kurtherian Gambit, #4))
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Because the boss is strictly a Coke person. She believes Pepsi, well let’s just say that Pepsi is the devils brew.
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Michael Anderle (Never Forsaken (The Kurtherian Gambit, #5))
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The Federation liked Pepsi, so if you supported the Federation you drank it. Her people, though? The ones who got the jobs done and disappeared back into the darkness? The ones who wore the masks that caused those who abused power to look over their shoulders in fear? Well, the masked vigilantes drank Coke. As they should.
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Michael Anderle (Life Goes On (The Kurtherian Gambit, #21))
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A master does not need an airplane, Nike Air, Pepsi Coke or another bottle of juice.
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Petra Hermans (Voor een betere wereld)
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In line with the Coke and Pepsi “challenges,” it turned out that the brain activation of the participants was different depending on whether the name of the drink was revealed or not. This is what happened: Whenever a person received a squirt of Coke or Pepsi, the center of the brain associated with strong feelings of emotional connection—called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, VMPFC—was stimulated. But when the participants knew they were going to get a squirt of Coke, something additional happened. This time, the frontal area of the brain—the dorsolateral aspect of the prefrontal cortex, DLPFC, an area involved in higher human brain functions like working memory, associations, and higher-order cognitions and ideas—was also activated. It happened with Pepsi—but even more so with Coke (and, naturally, the response was stronger in people who had a stronger preference for Coke). The reaction of the brain to the basic hedonic value of the drinks (essentially sugar) turned out to be similar for the two drinks. But the advantage of Coke over Pepsi was due to Cokes's brand—which activated the higher-order brain mechanisms. These associations, then, and not the chemical properties of the drink, gave Coke an advantage in the marketplace.
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Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
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It was not until 1924 when two German researchers, John Jenkins and Karl Dallenbach, pitted sleep and wake against each other to see which one won out for a memory-savings benefit—a memory researchers’ version of the classic Coke vs. Pepsi challenge. Their study participants first learned a list of verbal facts. Thereafter, the researchers tracked how quickly the participants forgot those memories over an eight-hour time interval, either spent awake or across a night of sleep. Time spent asleep helped cement the newly learned chunks of information, preventing them from fading away. In contrast, an equivalent time spent awake was deeply hazardous to recently acquired memories, resulting in an accelerated trajectory of forgetting.
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Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
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Only after the nation had been herded into suburbs for over a decade were perceptive critics like Lewis Mumford able to see the type of person the housers were trying (and succeeding) to engineer. The suburbs fostered what Mumford called “compulsory mobility,” which was more controlling than the compulsory stability of being forced to live within the medieval city’s walls, because it limited the possibility of human interaction much more dramatically. And without the possibility of contact that is not managed for commercial or other purposes congenial to those who want to control him, man is reduced to the most vulnerable form of individual life and political impotence. The sprawling nature of the suburb was itself a form of control. “Sprawling isolation,” according to Mumford, “has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control” than enclosure and close supervision because it dramatically limits the possibility of human interaction and the unpredictable and uncontrollable flow of information that goes with it.
Modern forms of social control depend on controlling the flow of information, not on constant supervision. By limiting the options to choosing a Ford over a Chevy or Coke over Pepsi, the people who control the flow of information channel behavior into certain acceptable patterns while at the same time promoting the illusion of freedom of choice. By inhibiting direct contact, the suburb allows information to be “monopolized by central agents and conveyed through guarded channels, too costly to be utilized by small groups or private individuals.”
As a result, “each member of Suburbia becomes imprisoned by the very separation that he has prized: he is fed through a narrow opening: a telephone line, a radio band, a television circuit.*! Here Mumford is articulating, without being specific about it, one of the prime goals of psychological warfare, namely, the prohibition of unauthorized communication among subject peoples. Mumford goes on to say that “this is not . . . the result of a conscious conspiracy by a cunning minority” but his disclaimer is less persuasive than the picture of social control he paints. If, one wonders, this system has not been put into effect by conscious design, how did it get there? Is it possible to have social control without social controllers?
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E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
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I’ll just have fries and a Coke,” Amber said. “Is Pepsi okay?” the waitress asked. “Sure.” Does anyone ever say no to that question?
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R.L. Stine (Drop Dead Gorgeous (Return to Fear Street, #3))
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Even when they have a Pepsi bottle in their fridge they would be more likely to say, ‘I’m going to have a Coke.
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Matt Haig (Brand Failures: The Truth about the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time)
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Isn’t it? Unfortunately, the voxel, our smallest unit, measures fifty cubic millimeters and already contains around five million neurons. Despite the power of our scanner, it’s like seeing the outline of a city from up in the sky, without being able to make out the pattern of the streets or the architecture of its buildings. But it’s already a giant step. Ever since one brilliant scientist had the idea, a few years ago, to make people drink Coke and Pepsi in a scanner, the possibilities have become limitless. They were blindfolded and asked which soft drink they preferred before tasting it. Most answered Coke. But in the blind test, the same people said they preferred the taste of Pepsi. The scanner showed that an area in the brain, called putamen, reacted more strongly for Pepsi than for Coke. Putamen is the seat of immediate, instinctive pleasures.
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Franck Thilliez (Syndrome E)
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When Warren was a little boy fingerprinting nuns and collecting bottle caps, he had no knowledge of what he would someday become. Yet as he rode his bike through Spring Valley, flinging papers day after day, and raced through the halls of The Westchester, pulse pounding, trying to make his deliveries on time, if you had asked him if he wanted to be the richest man on earth—with his whole heart, he would have said, Yes.
That passion had led him to study a universe of thousands of stocks. It made him burrow into libraries and basements for records nobody else troubled to get. He sat up nights studying hundreds of thousands of numbers that would glaze anyone else’s eyes. He read every word of several newspapers each morning and sucked down the Wall Street Journal like his morning Pepsi, then Coke. He dropped in on companies, spending hours talking about barrels with the woman who ran an outpost of Greif Bros. Cooperage or auto insurance with Lorimer Davidson. He read magazines like the Progressive Grocer to learn how to stock a meat department. He stuffed the backseat of his car with Moody’s Manuals and ledgers on his honeymoon. He spent months reading old newspapers dating back a century to learn the cycles of business, the history of Wall Street, the history of capitalism, the history of the modern corporation. He followed the world of politics intensely and recognized how it affected business. He analyzed economic statistics until he had a deep understanding of what they signified. Since childhood, he had read every biography he could find of people he admired, looking for the lessons he could learn from their lives. He attached himself to everyone who could help him and coattailed anyone he could find who was smart. He ruled out paying attention to almost anything but business—art, literature, science, travel, architecture—so that he could focus on his passion. He defined a circle of competence to avoid making mistakes. To limit risk he never used any significant amount of debt. He never stopped thinking about business: what made a good business, what made a bad business, how they competed, what made customers loyal to one versus another. He had an unusual way of turning problems around in his head, which gave him insights nobody else had. He developed a network of people who—for the sake of his friendship as well as his sagacity—not only helped him but also stayed out of his way when he wanted them to. In hard times or easy, he never stopped thinking about ways to make money. And all of this energy and intensity became the motor that powered his innate intelligence, temperament, and skills.
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Alice Schroeder (The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life)
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In the South,” he said, “they call everything a Coke. So if you say you want a Coke, you then have to specify if you want a Pepsi Coke, or a Coke Coke.” “What
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Anne Frasier (Hush)
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I am willing to bet that there are ten times as many people on the planet who are currently being paid to debate why people prefer Coke or Pepsi than there are being paid to ask questions like ‘Why do people request a doctor’s appointment?’, ‘Why do people go to university?’ or ‘Why do people retire?’ The answers to these last three questions are believed to be rational and self-evident, but they are not.
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Rory Sutherland (Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life)
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The jeering, hooting young men who battered down the Babri Masjid are the same ones whose pictures appeared in the papers in the days that followed the nuclear tests. They were on the streets, celebrating India’s nuclear bomb and simultaneously “condemning Western Culture” by emptying crates of Coke and Pepsi into public drains. I’m a little baffled by their logic: Coke is Western Culture, but the nuclear bomb is an old Indian tradition? Yes, I’ve heard—the bomb is in the Vedas. It might be, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find Coke in the Vedas, too. That’s the great thing about all religious texts. You can find anything you want in them—as long as you know what you’re looking for.
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Arundhati Roy (My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction)
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Can I get you anything? I’ve got green tea, herbal, filtered water, or I could juice up some carrots and celery for you.”
“No Pepsi? Isn’t it illegal to be that healthy?”
“Cherry Coke is a deep dark secret in my life, Detective, but I only get one a month.”
“That’s even worse, having a disciplined vice.
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C. A. Newsome (Lia Anderson Dog Park Mysteries: Books 5 - 7)
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Predictably irrational
1) the importance of having something for FREE when selling something.
2) the price we hear effects what we’re willing to pay. Known as arbitrary coherence. The basic idea of arbitrary coherence is this: Although initial prices can be "arbitrary," once those prices are established in our minds, they will shape not only present prices but also future ones (thus making them "coherent"). Eg new tv on market we kook for an anchor price. Released at £1200. That’s the anchor
3) when we own something we over value it. The seller feels all the things they could do with it. The buyer feels what they could do with the money.
4) experiences are shaped by our expectations. Coke Pepsi test. Or example if we have heard a movie is good we will enjoy it more.
5) social norms and market norms.
6 ) most people are dishonest. Get people thinking about honesty. When people thought about the 10 commandments.
7) acknowledge your weakness and set your deadlines. Also set yourself short term awards when reaching long term goals.
8) try not to keep your options open. The Chinese war where he burned the boats so they couldn’t retreat.
If you have your options open on two things close one of them so you can fully focus on one.
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Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
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Watching the traders buy big blocks of shares, Bamberger observed that prices often moved higher, as might be expected. Prices headed lower when Morgan Stanley’s traders sold blocks of shares. Each time, the trading activity altered the gap, or spread, between the stock in question and the other company in the pair, even when there was no news in the market. An order to sell a chunk of Coke shares, for instance, might send that stock down a percentage point or even two, even as Pepsi barely moved. Once the effect of their Coke stock selling wore off, the spread between the shares reverted to the norm,
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Gregory Zuckerman (The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution)
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People love to group themselves. Are you team A or B. Coke or Pepsi. Right or wrong. Left or right. Glass half full or glass half empty. But to me, those are just self-confinements.
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Jagger Cole (The Hunted Queen (Kings & Villains, #5))
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blue versus black ink is an essential identity issue. Much like Coke versus Pepsi, or the Beatles versus the Stones, or college-ruled notebooks versus regular. You can be one kind of person or the other, but not both.
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Katherine Center (The Rom-Commers)
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When a small but growing company like Santa Monica Seafood begins to dominate a segment of the fresh fish market, putting pressure on big companies like Sysco or U.S. Foods, they simply step in and buy them out.” Danreb snapped his fingers. “Poof! No more competition. If the smaller company won’t sell, then the larger corporation, with more resources, squeezes them; usually by cutting off distribution and shipping. It’s more coordinated and integrated than the Mafia, and most of it is even legal. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo do the same thing. They watch and monitor their sector, and when another drink company starts to get traction, they buy it or cut off its distribution. When was the last time you were in a restaurant or stadium or arena that served both Coke and Pepsi? Never happens. They split up the market. And chances are, any other available beverage that isn’t owned by Coke or Pepsi is at least distributed by them, which is another means of control. The point is, if you start to be successful, you get crushed, unless you are in the club.” “You said
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Jack Carr (Only the Dead (Terminal List #6))