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Thursday, 6 February 2020

Weekend Reading


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.

Now you can be as fast as Usain Bolt!!
Nike openly promotes the Vaporfly as "the fastest shoe we've ever made," and Vaporflys were worn last year by 31 of 36 of the top finishers at the six biggest marathons in the world.
But rival shoemakers and many in the running community cried foul, saying the shoe's design amounted to "technological doping." The $250 shoes have foam soles and a carbon fiber plate in each heel to help propel a runner's stride.
World Athletics also announced it would be undertaking further research to "establish the true impact" of new technology that could provide a performance advantage, noting that "there is sufficient evidence to raise concerns that the integrity of the sport might be threatened by the recent developments in shoe technology."

Addressable TV - the new frontier for TV ads
A new era is underway in which media companies can show different ads to different households while they are watching the same programme. advancements in dynamic ad insertion have paved the way for marketers to address specific audiences with assets tailored to their tastes and preferences, calling into question the very future of the traditional TV ad as we know it.

A peek into how online ads work
When you click onto a website, the page has some blank boxes that are set aside for ads. Instantly, those slots are posted on an ad exchange, along with data about you (which your browser dutifully hands over). An auction is held, and the winners send their ads to fill the spots. When it works right, you don’t even notice the lag.
Obviously, no person is sitting there bidding on a display ad for a single viewer. With millions of such transactions occurring every day, it’s all done by computers. That means competitive advantage should come down to who has the best algorithms.

Use your mobile to vote
King County, where Seattle is located, announced on Wednesday that it’s implementing smartphone voting for an upcoming board of supervisors election.
King County’s 1.2 million residents can use their cellphones to vote in the election. The board of supervisors election is one of many “pilots” that Tusk plans to implement over the next five years in counties around the US. There’s no indication yet of whether King County plans to expand the system to statewide or national elections.

Tech in 2020: Standing on the shoulders of giants
A very good collection of datapoints on how technology is changing consumer usage patterns specially in the mobile, ecommerce, media consumption spaces. What are the challenges and what are the paths to the future.

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Monday, 27 January 2020

Interaction on ET Now

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Friday, 24 January 2020

Weekend Reading


1) Now an electric car on subscription
Canoo thinks the tides are changing and a subscription-based car-buying model is the future. Canoo subscribers pay a monthly fee for a bundle that includes a Canoo EV, maintenance, registration, access to insurance, and charging. The service launches next year. Canoo calls its vehicle an "urban loft on wheels." With a wraparound bench, the Canoo’s inside is designed to feel like a living room.


2) Yuval Noah Harari warns that companies and governments can "hack" humans
For Harari, the age of rival investment between the US and China in Artificial Intelligence should worry us all.
"On the most shallow level it could be a repeat of the nineteenth century industrial revolution, when the leaders had the chance to dominate the world economically and politically," he said. "I understand the current arms race as an imperial arms race...You don't need to send the soldiers in if you have all the data on a country."
From the geopolitical to the personal, the age of digital surveillance also threatens what it means to be human and free, Harari warned.
"The point is when you gather enough data on people, you get to know people better than they know yourself. Are we at the point where companies or governments can hack millions of people, that means they know my medical history, personal weaknesses?"
But how do you hack a human being?
"You need a lot of biological knowledge, enough computer power, and enough data about me. You can hack my body, my brain, my life, you can reach a point where you know me better than I know myself," he said.
In his view, there is state surveillance in China, surveillance capitalism in the US, and no serious third player in the arms race for tech dominance.


3) They know where you were last summer!! ;-)
Clearview AI, a relatively unknown tech company, has devised a ground-breaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.
Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.


4) Is there a case for central bank digital currency (CBDC)?
Money, as we know, has three functions. It’s a unit of account, a medium of exchange and a store of value. Money issued by central banks, which is the norm around the world, performs all these three functions. Such money is uncontested legal tender. A central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a different proposition, different from these commercial cryptocurrencies because a CBDC will be able to perform like money. It will be able to perform all the three functions of money that I listed above. It will be like traditional money except that it will be in a digital form. The main advantage will be that a CBDC will make payment systems more efficient.


5) A new book walks through business failures
While much can be learned from business success stories, there is a lot to learn from mistakes, failures, blunders, errors, lapses, traps, snags, bad judgment, mistiming, malpractice, deceit, fraud, and foibles as well, Robin begins. Forewarned is forearmed, and the lessons of hindsight and research can help avoid failures on your part as well, and prevent the destruction or erosion of value.

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Thursday, 16 January 2020

Weekend Reading

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.

 A peek into biohacking - trying to extend human lifespan to beyond 100 years
Silicon Valley pros see a century of human life as a 20th-century limitation. If we went from a TRS-80 to an iPhone in 30 years, we can surely double human life using big data and self-quantification. What is the body if not another piece of hardware waiting to be hacked? Isn’t it time that death got disrupted?


Renting clothes - the next big disruption!! ;-)
Rental is going strong, with Rent the Runway, the pioneer in this area, now 10 years old and profitable. The global online clothing rental market is expected to grow annually by over 10% for the next four years, according to MarketWatch. And the fashion resale market has been expanding a breathtaking 21 times faster than traditional retail over the past three years, Fortune reports. Millennials and Gen Zers, in particular, enjoy frequenting thrift and consignment stores, shredding the last remnants of social embarrassment about such places and remaking their image into trendy shopping destinations.
Rent the Runway, an online service that rents out designer clothes and accessories, was a major leap toward bringing the sharing economy into the fashion business. Today, the company’s subscription base has crossed 11 million members.


How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist
Magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention.


Here is another reason for trying to be wealthy ;-)
According to a new study, wealthy men and women don’t only live longer, they also get eight to nine more healthy years after 50 than the poorest individuals in the United States and in England. Though education level and social class had some effect, neither was found to be nearly as significant as wealth. Additional study is required to understand why wealth in particular is such a strong indicator of how long someone lives unimpaired, but it was most likely a function of having access to funds when you have ill health. Additionally, poverty has been linked to higher stress levels, which has implications for health.


How to lose a monopoly? Learn from Microsoft and IBM
A big rich company, a company that dominates the market for its product, and a company that dominates the broader tech industry are three quite different things. Market cap isn’t power.
IBM ruled mainframes and Microsoft ruled PCs, and when those things were the centre of tech, that gave them dominance of the broader tech industry. When the focus of tech moved away from mainframes and then PCs, IBM and then Microsoft lost that dominance, but that didn’t mean they stopped being big companies. We just stopped being scared of them.
For both IBM and Microsoft, market power in one generation of tech didn’t give them market power in the next, and anti-trust intervention didn’t have much to do with it. It doesn’t matter how big your castle is if the trade routes move somewhere else.


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Thursday, 9 January 2020

Weekend Reading

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.
Retailers are fighting back online returns
Some in the industry that created the monster are trying to put it back in its cage. They’re taking baby steps—not providing pre-paid mailing labels, requiring a receipt unless an unwanted item is carried to a store—but also threatening to cut off serial returners, the most troublesome of the offenders. Among the others: people who wait months (or more) before returning and the so-called wardrobers, who wear articles of clothing and then ship them back.
Reverse logistics — the transport from buyers to sellers — is not only costly on its own but creates a need for lots of room for storage. Return stock is thrown into an empty space in a warehouse to pile up until someone can get to it.


And fintech startups are getting into the space to facilitate returns
Consulting firm Newmine launched its Chief Returns Officer product. Newmine says that it processes data from multiple sources and uses “data science and AI principles” to determine the cause of returns in near real time. Retailers using the service receive actionable recommendations for resolving problems during the selling season.
Supply.ai’s ReturnSense is a returns prevention platform that learns customer behavior, detects the likelihood of returns, alerts the retailer and intervenes in the purchase process to mediate with customers about their product choices. The firm says its algorithm draws from over 1,000 data variables to predict which orders are likely to be returned. The company says that its service prevents returns and makes shoppers feel more confident in their purchase choices.
Other technology providers include Returnly, a fintech platform that turns product returns into repurchases by enabling customers to buy again with instant exchanges and refunds, before they have even returned their items. Appriss Retail’s Verify service is a consumer-based returns authorization system that uses predictive algorithms and statistical models to distinguish those engaged in fraudulent and abusive behavior and deny them the ability to make returns.


A real-life thriller in the making - the escape of Carlos Ghosn
One of the country’s most famous criminal suspects had slipped past the cameras trained on his house, past the police and border guards and the Japanese citizens who for the past year have followed his every move.
Carlos Ghosn, the deposed chief of the Nissan and Renault auto empire facing charges of financial wrongdoing, had fled to Lebanon, and no one in Japan — not the authorities, the media or even the auto executive’s own lawyer — could explain how it had happened.
It was a cinematic escape, carried out just before New Year’s Day, Japan’s most important holiday, when government agencies and most businesses close for as long as a week.


The search for a distraction free environment goes back centuries!
Medieval monks had a terrible time concentrating. And concentration was their lifelong work! Their tech was obviously different from ours. But their anxiety about distraction was not. They complained about being overloaded with information, and about how, even once you finally settled on something to read, it was easy to get bored and turn to something else. They were frustrated by their desire to stare out of the window, or to constantly check on the time (in their case, with the Sun as their clock), or to think about food or sex when they were supposed to be thinking about God.


Understanding the US-Iran conflict through the lens of history
From the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Iran's prime minister in 1953, to tension and confrontation under President Trump, a look back over more than 65 years of tricky relations between Iran and the US.

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Monday, 30 December 2019

Presentation in MDI Gurgaon

Earlier this month I had the absolute privilege of addressing Prof Bakshi's class at MDI Gurgaon. Attached is the presentation I shared in the session. I made this presentation specifically keeping in mind students who may not be seasoned investors and for whom, the meta-skills are more important to learn.



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Thursday, 26 December 2019

Weekend Reading


Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year Ahead.

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.

The economics of the "young old"
The year 2020 will mark the beginning of the decade of the yold, or the “young old”, as the Japanese call people aged between 65 and 75.
Health worsens with age, but the yold are resisting the decline better than most: of the 3.7 years of increased life expectancy in rich countries between 2000 and 2015, says the World Health Organisation, 3.2 years were enjoyed in good health. The yold are also better off: between 1989 and 2013, the median wealth of families headed by someone over 62 in America rose by 40% to $210,000, while the wealth of all other age groups declined.
The yold are busier, too. In 2016 just over a fifth of people aged 65-69 were in work in rich countries, a figure that is rising fast. Working is one of the factors that are helping people stay healthy longer. A German study found that people who remain at work after the normal retirement age manage to slow the cognitive decline associated with old age and have a cognitive capacity of someone a year and a half younger.

8 ways financial statements are manipulated
Every company manipulates its numbers to a certain extent to make sure budgets balance, executives score bonuses, and investors continue to offer up funding. Such creative accounting is nothing new. However, factors such as greed, desperation, immorality, and bad judgment can cause some executives to cross the line into outright corporate fraud. Investors should know how to recognize the basic warning signs of falsified statements. While the details are typically hidden, even from accountants, there are red flags in financial statements that can point to the use of manipulating methods.

Reducing noise helps in forecasting better
In a digital world swarming with fake news and sensationalist content, those who cast about widely for information are sure to reel in some strange fish. To extrapolate, superforecasters’ true edge may be more about discipline – the mental rigour required to distinguish random from revealing data – than innate wisdom or intellectual objectivity.
Whatever the reason, investing in noise reduction may not be a bad idea. One proven, if drastic, noise-reduction solution is to assign predictions to algorithms rather than humans. Bots are programmed to pay attention to patterns in data and discount random information.

The silent mobile revolution in India
There are now more than 450 million mobile internet users in India, a number that is expected to grow to 667 million by 2022. Not so surprising considering that India has the lowest data costs in the world and its fixed-line download speeds continue to rise. It’s not just the urban middle class who have benefitted. Nearly half of India’s 250,000 village councils are now connected by fibre optic networks, with the other half scheduled to come online in the next two years. More than 300,000 so-called common service centres have been set up around the country to provide even impoverished villagers with access to digital services.

Always average up
Never double down, always double up. And here’s the interesting thing, so most people think if you’ve done the work and you buy something and it goes against you, you should buy more. And what Julian would say is no, we’re just wrong. Made a mistake and the market’s right, the market’s … this goes back to the efficient markets. It’s not that the market’s always efficient, but when it’s telling you you’re wrong you should listen to it. And there’s the famous picture of Paul Tudor Jones in his dorm room with the losers average losers sign.
Now most people would say, “Well wait a minute, that’s not a value investor.” Well think about it, is it or is it not? So what he’s saying is when he had edge, when he had knowledge about an area, an asset, a company and they made an investment and now the market is coming around to your view, rather than do what most human beings do, which is pull their flowers. They’re so happy to have a win they take profits. He’s like, “Well let’s buy more because it’s working.” And there’s the simple statement of let’s do more of what’s working and less of what’s not. Most of us don’t do that, we do more of what’s not working and less of what’s working, which is why the average person underperforms.

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