Reading
across disciplines is one of the best ways to improve our investment acumen.
Here is a summary of some of the best articles I read this week.
E-Sports (competitive video games) is big business
China now boasts a
gaming population of over 500 million, and competitive gaming has become big
business. Esports-related sales in China hit 51.3 billion yuan ($7.3 billion)
during the first six months of 2019 and are on track to top 100 billion yuan
for the year.
There are more than
5,000 gaming teams operating in an industry that now employs 440,000 people.
Depending on their
contracts, trainees are paid about 10,000 yuan per month, while mid- to
upper-ranking gamers earn around $50,000 annually, according to Li Xinyuan, the
team manager. Top-tier gamers can earn over $90,000. Those rates mean even
trainees make more than average factory workers in Shanghai, whose initial
monthly take-home pay is typically around 4,000-5,000 yuan per month.
Vinod Sethi's prescription to becoming a better
investor
Mr. Sethi believes
that formal education is a necessity but not sufficient. He believes that
education doesn’t teach you about hunger, relationship, courage, inner voice –
listening to yourself, feel the present moment and many other aspects. There
are many other aspects and skills which one requires in investing business and
daily life.
Mr Sethi reads at
least one annual report a day. He might read an annual report of a private
company in Europe where he won’t be even able to invest. According to him, an
annual report is a summary of collective human effort. Hence, it shouldn’t
matter what annual report you are reading. One makes money where one sees
financial efficiency, an alchemy or something stands out. There is no need to
read an annual report to the last line. Over time one can develop sense as to
what to read and what not to read. Also, according to him, speed reading helps.
Only way to meet
very smart people is by making yourself very smart. No one would give you time
unless you give more than they gave you. If you start every meeting thinking I
must give more than what I am expected to gain, then you achieve a very high level
of evolution at personal level.
Three things are a
must do for a good investor:
Pay attention to the
Market, Read & Research and Introspect
Can mirrors do the trick?
A typical large
steel mill might burn through 1.5 million metric tons of coal in its furnaces
in a year. It hasn’t been possible to run that type of industrial process on
renewable energy, because of the extremely hot temperatures required, making
nearly a quarter of global emissions hard to eliminate. But new
technology—which concentrates solar thermal energy to 1,000 degrees Celsius for
the first time—could transform some of the most polluting industries, including
steel, cement, and petrochemical production.
The technology, from
a California-based startup called Heliogen, uses an array of mirrors to reflect
sunlight.
Machine learning determines ghost writer writing for
Shakespeare
Literary analysts
have long noticed the hand of another author in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Now a
neural network has identified the specific scenes in question—and who actually
wrote them.
For much of his
life, William Shakespeare was the house playwright for an acting company called
the King’s Men that performed his plays on the banks of the River Thames in
London. When Shakespeare died in 1616, the company needed a replacement and
turned to one of the most prolific and famous playwrights of the time, a man
named John Fletcher.
The new approach is
straightforward in principle. Machine-learning algorithms have been used for
some years to identify distinctive patterns in the way authors write.
The technique uses a
body of the author’s work to train the algorithm and a different, smaller body
of work to test it on. However, because an author’s literary style can change
throughout his or her lifetime, it is important to ensure that all works have
the same style.
Once the algorithm
has learned the style in terms of the most commonly used words and rhythmic
patterns, it is able to recognize it in texts it has never seen.
Podcast: Replacing faulty body organs
Laser-printing
organs and vascular systems to give everybody another chance has incredible
value. It changes the dynamics of how to handle endemic diseases like diabetes
and many other organ issues, liver, kidney and maybe eventually very complex
systems like the nervous systems inside our bodies.
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