Weekend Reading - 11-Feb-22

 

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. If you like this collection, consider forwarding it to someone who you think will appreciate it.

 

You can sign up to https://www.getrevue.co/profile/intelsense to receive all blogs from me directly into your inbox.

Why Do Kids Lie?

Children typically begin lying in the preschool years, between two and four years of age.

But from a developmental perspective, lying in young children is rarely cause for concern. In fact, lying is often one of the first signs a young child has developed a “theory of mind”, which is the awareness that  others may have different desires, feelings, and beliefs to oneself.

 

While lying itself may not be socially desirable, the ability to know what others are thinking and feeling is an important social skill. It’s related to empathy, cooperation, and care for others when they’re feeling upset.

 

As children get older and their perspective-taking ability develops, they’re increasingly able to understand the kinds of lies that will be believable to others. They also become better at maintaining the lie over time. Moral development also kicks in. Younger children are more likely to lie for personal gain, while older children increasingly anticipate feeling bad about themselves if they lie. Older children and teens are also more likely to draw distinctions between different kinds of lies. White lies, to them, are considered more appropriate than harmful or antisocial lies

https://www.all-about-psychology.com/why-do-kids-lie-and-is-it-normal.html

 

Strive to be 1% better each day

The 1% better each day mindset doesn’t work if you have an enormous ego. Egos tell us we can have 300% better days. Egos make us believe in fake progress. Egos make us take credit for progress someone else created.

 

1% better is laced in humility. It’s a competition you have with yourself, quietly, each day.

 

The progress of 1% better is slow. It took me 5 years to get momentum from this 1% mindset. Most people can’t last. They want it now! now! now! so they can take a picture of success and put it on Instagram.

 

It takes everything you’ve got to show up every day for 5 years and be 1% better each time. When you do, though, you stack hidden progress you can’t see. Being 1% better includes pain. No need to avoid it. Expect it and let it help.

 

You stay on path with your goals when you have a system. But if tragedies can temporarily derail systems you build, then there’s a mindset you need.

 

Program your mind to see everything in life as opportunity. Optimism helps keep your 1% each day winning streak going. The best question is this: how can I use this to my advantage? Or say to yourself, if I had a gun to my head and got forced to see the good in this situation, what would it be?

https://timdenning.com/crazy-how-good-life-becomes-when-you-focus-on-being-1-better-each-day/

 

 

We are never satisfied

As for money, more of it helps up to a point—it can buy things and services that relieve the problems of poverty, which are sources of unhappiness. But forever chasing money as a source of enduring satisfaction simply does not work. “The nature of [adaptation] condemns men to live on a hedonic treadmill,” the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell wrote in 1971, “to seek new levels of stimulation merely to maintain old levels of subjective pleasure, to never achieve any kind of permanent happiness or satisfaction.”

 

Yet even if you recognize all this, getting off the treadmill is hard. It feels dangerous. Our urge for more is quite powerful, but stronger still is our resistance to less.

 

So you try and you try, but you make no lasting progress toward your goal. You find yourself running simply to avoid being thrown off the back of the treadmill. The wealthy keep accumulating far beyond anything they could possibly spend, and sometimes more than they want to bequeath to their children. They hope that at some point they will feel happy, their lives complete, and are terrified of what will happen if they stop running. As the great 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/03/why-we-are-never-satisfied-happiness/621304/

 

 

Mind your attention

It’s not just your time that matters, but your attention. As the great Stoic philosopher Seneca once said: Life is long if you know how to use it.

 

But I’m not wasting time anymore. Because I’ve started to notice how some other people guard their attention and it’s had a profound impact on me.

 

For example, Marc Andreessen has been known to block thousands of people on Twitter so that he doesn’t have to see opposing ideas in his newsfeed. He won’t even let his attention stray from his core beliefs for a fraction of a second. Though Andreessen’s actions are extreme, I understand why. He realizes that attention is the last frontier, the last thing we have to ourselves. So he does everything he can to protect it.

 

The message is clear—protect your attention at all costs. Because if you don’t, someone else will happily take it from you. That someone else could be a corporation, a social media influencer, or someone in your personal life. Whoever it is, watch who and what you give your attention to.

 

Because every day your attention is getting more valuable. Every day companies are getting better at monetizing it and every day you are getting a little bit older (meaning you have less total attention to spend than the day before).

 

In fact, there is a war going on for your attention. It’s a war that has been waged for decades and it’s only getting worse. For example, it’s been estimated that the average person encounters over 5,000 advertisements per day, up from just a few hundred per day in the 1970s.

 

Today there are more people fighting for your attention than ever before. This is why you have to be mindful of it if you want to make progress in your life.

https://ofdollarsanddata.com/do-i-have-your-attention-now/

 

 

Wealth is what you don't do with your money

Wealth is what you don’t spend, which makes it invisible and hard to learn about by observing other people’s lives. Spending is contagious; wealth is mysterious.

 

Money is often a negative art. What you don’t do can be more important than what you actively do.

 

Everything has a price, and prices aren’t always clear. The price of exercise isn’t just the workout; it’s avoiding the post-workout urge to eat a ton of food. Same in finance. The price of building wealth isn’t just the trouble of earning money or dealing; it’s avoiding the post-income urge to spend what you’ve accumulated.

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/after-the-fact/

 

UPDATES THIS WEEK:

As part of the Intelsense Knowledge Series, we published the following Annual Report Summaries:

Control Print	ControlPrint.pdf
Time Technoplast	TimeTechnoplast - AR Summary 2021.pdf
Ashiana Housing	Ashiana - AR Summary 2021.pdf

Weekend Reading - 04-Feb-22

 

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. If you like this collection, consider forwarding it to someone who you think will appreciate it.

 

You can sign up to https://www.getrevue.co/profile/intelsense to receive all blogs from me directly into your inbox.

1. It’s OK To Build Wealth Slowly

Life and risk are both full of trade-offs.

 

I know clients with tens of millions of dollars who have the ability to take lots of risk but not the desire so they play it safe. I know other clients with tens of millions of dollars who have the ability to take lots of risk and do so with certain parts of their portfolio because they can.

 

So much of the success for any investment or wealth-building strategy comes down to your personality. And the best part about building wealth slowly is…it actually works.

 

Had I made some extreme bets with my career or portfolio I could have way more money but those bets also could have crashed and burned, leaving me in a far worse position.

 

What ifs are useless when it comes to your finances. There are plenty of different ways to build wealth. The important thing to remember is you don’t have to follow someone else’s path just because it looks easy.

 

There are always trade-offs in life and investing.

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/01/its-ok-to-build-wealth-slowly/

 

 

 

2. Why competitive advantage dies

Buddhism has a concept called beginner’s mind, which is an active openness to trying new things and studying new ideas, unburdened by past preconceptions, like a beginner would. Knowing you have a competitive advantage is often the enemy of beginner’s mind, because doing well reduces the incentive to explore other ideas, especially when those ideas conflict with your proven strategy. Which is dangerous. Being locked into a single view is fatal in an economy where reversion to the mean and competition constantly dismantles old strategies.

 

Maintaining financial success takes precedence over traits that were vital to building the initial idea. Nothing to lose is a wonderful thing to have. You focus all your energy on building something great. Having a quarterly dividend to maintain is what happens after you build something great. But it can come at the expense of what made you successful in the first place.

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/why-competitive-advantages-die/

 

 

3. Your Attention Didn’t Collapse. It Was Stolen.

The average teenager now believes they can follow six forms of media at the same time. When neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually juggling. “They’re switching back and forth…”

 

Imagine, say, you are doing your tax return, and you receive a text, and you look at it – it’s only a glance, taking three seconds – and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another. When this happens, the evidence shows that your performance drops. You’re slower.

 

This is called the “switch-cost effect”. It means that if you check your texts while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts themselves – you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which turns out to be a huge amount.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-span-focus-screens-apps-smartphones-social-media

 

 

4. Always be prepared for a correction in equities

Investing in the stock market is a challenging mental exercise.

 

Among other things, investors have to cope with two seemingly conflicting realities: In the long-run, things almost always work out for the better; but in the short-run, anything and everything can go very badly.

 

Unfortunately, it is incredibly difficult to predict when stocks will fall. And exiting stocks in an attempt to avoid short-term losses can prove incredibly costly to long-term returns.

 

So, whether or not you can comprehensively identify and balance all of the potential bullish and bearish market catalysts, it’s probably a good idea to just always be prepared for stocks to experience some big dips on their long upward journey.

 

If you’re not able to stomach short-term volatility or if your portfolio can’t handle short-term unrealized losses, then investing in the stock market might not be for you.

 

These short-term challenges are the price investors pay for long-term riches.

https://www.tker.co/p/weekly-short-term-cautious-long-term-optimist

 

 

5. Size helps. Before it hurts.

Body size in biology is like leverage in investing: It accentuates the gains but amplifies the losses. It works well for a while and then backfires spectacularly at the point where the benefits are nice but the losses are lethal.

 

Take injury. Big animals are fragile. An ant can fall from an elevation 15,000 times its height and walk away unharmed. A rat will break bones falling from an elevation 50 times its height. A human will die from a fall at 10 times its height. An elephant falling from twice its height splashes like a water balloon.

 

The most dominant creatures tend to be huge, but the most enduring tend to be smaller. T-Rex < cockroach < bacteria.

 

Size is nature’s leverage. Sought after for its benefits straight up to the point that it ferociously turns against you.

 

Same thing applies to companies and investments.

 

The important point here is that these companies didn’t get big because of greed or ego. They got big because economies of scale made them more efficient. Economic evolution pushed them that direction, naturally and rationally, so they could do their job better. Cope’s Rule in action. But that same force pushes them straight up to a level of self-destruction that can undermine all the previous gains, even put them out of business. That sounds crazy, but it’s been happening in nature for hundreds of millions of years.

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/casualties-of-your-own-success/

 

 

Investing During Inflation

THE BUDGET

I am writing this the morning after the budget. The budget has slowly become a non-event, which is exactly what it should be. It is only the financial media which, more driven by TRP – a form of incentive caused bias, keeps it at the center of events. In essence, the budget has two components. The first is a presentation of finances for the ongoing financial year. The next is a plan of allocation of financial resources for the next year. That’s it. The plan for the next year is an intent. It is not cast in stone. And the plan also is updated based on updated situations during the year. At most the budget can give a feeler in terms of the intent of the government for the following year.

Even without the pronouncement during the budget, most of those who follow the financial sector, knew that the focus is on infrastructure building which in turn leads to what economists’ term as “crowding-in effect”. That is when government spending is followed by private spending due to a rise in overall economic growth. Overall, this leads to a rise in jobs, wages and hopefully, more prosperity all around.

The other areas of government expenditure are social spending under various names and heads and a push for “Atmanirbhar Bharat”.

INFLATION

Perhaps the biggest threat to global equities today is inflation. Some economists say it is because of temporary supply side constraints whereas others believe it to be more structural in nature and occurring due to the massive injection of ‘helicopter money’ by central banks post the pandemic.

I am not an economist. So, my thoughts are more theories based on my observations.

When I look at the production of any commodity, I don’t see any dip in supply.

I cannot find any industry where supply is way below what was there before the pandemic began. Even in the most well-known case of semiconductor shortage, the aggregate production has not really gone down. It is just that the demand has increased sharply and also some companies like Intel are also now outsourcing their fab work to TSMC and their likes till their own expansion is in place. (ref: https://www.gizmochina.com/2021/09/22/intel-explains-why-it-is-outsourcing-chip-manufacturing-to-tsmc/)

The second fact that can be seen is the “Great Resignation” in the US. Literally millions of people, more low wage workers than their higher paid counterparts, are leaving the job market. There are many reasons being cited. From being overworked and underpaid to location constraints.

THE AGE OF DEGLOBALISATION

The last thirty odd years had seen a major shift in production of goods and services. For various reasons which are now well known, both manufacturing and services shifted to Asia (China, India, Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia etc). This was presented as a win-win as it helped customers in developed countries tide over labour shortages and get their products cheaper than producing it at home. The global supply chain started working in a completely optimized and efficient manner.

Additionally, the Asian countries have also developed in this period and the cost of production has started growing there are well. Wage rise and reduced working hours in China is a classic example. Stricter adherence to environmental norms is another such example.

RISING INEQUALITY

Another phenomenon that started taking shape parallelly was the rise of inequality across the world. People with higher education earned more and over three decades the gap that has been created has become substantial. This has many repercussions. We have started seeing social unrest across the globe. Countries and political parties have started becoming more hardline to protect domestic jobs and a lot of countries have started incentivizing domestic production. Free movement of labour across borders are also now being met with lot of skepticism and protectionism.

DEGLOBALISATION AND INFLATION

The net result of all these is that the manufacturing and services is likely to shift away from its lowest cost production centers globally in the next two-three decades. China+1 is just one such example. Similarly, we have seen Indian IT companies hiring significantly more in US and other “nearshores”.

INVESTING IN AN INFLATIONARY WORLD

We should witness a persistent inflation that is higher than what we are accustomed to in the past.

Governments straddled with mountains of debt would want to run a few years of high inflation and negative real rates.

The best part of all this is that companies that adopt technology which tends to have a disinflationary characteristic, are able to pass on cost increases to its customers (preferably global), are likely to benefit the most in the future.

This post first appeared in The Economic Times

Weekend Reading: 28-Jan-22

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. If you like this collection, consider forwarding it to someone who you think will appreciate it.

You can sign up to https://www.getrevue.co/profile/intelsense to receive all blogs from me directly into your inbox.

Weekend Reading - 21-Jan-22

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. If you like this collection, consider forwarding it to someone who you think will appreciate it.

 

You can sign up to https://www.getrevue.co/profile/intelsense to receive all blogs from me directly into your inbox.

1. Investing wisdom from Terry Smith's 2021 annual letter

In investment, as in life, you cannot have your cake and eat it, so it is difficult if not impossible to find companies which are resilient in a downturn but which also benefit fully from the subsequent recovery. Of course, you could try to trade out of the former and into the latter at an appropriate time but it is not what we seek to do as the vast majority of the returns which our Fund generates come from the ability of the companies we own to invest their retained earnings at a high rate of return because they own businesses with good returns and growth opportunities.

 

In our view it would be a mistake to sell some of these good businesses in order to invest temporarily in companies which are much worse but which have greater recovery potential.

 

Consistently high returns on capital are one sign we look for when seeking companies to invest in. Another is a source of growth — high returns are not much use if the business is not able to grow and deploy more capital at these high rates.

 

Our portfolio consists of companies that are fundamentally a lot better than the average of those in either index and are valued higher than the average S&P 500 company and much higher than the average FTSE 100 company. However, it is wise to bear in mind that despite the rather sloppy shorthand used by many commentators, highly rated does not equate to expensive any more than lowly rated equates to cheap.

https://www.fundsmith.co.uk/media/3wcngjie/2021-fef-annual-letter-to-shareholders-web.pdf

2. Winds of Change

The years since then have seen a massive shift in our environment. Today, unlike in the 1950s and ’60s, everything seems to change every day. It’s particularly hard to think of a company or industry that won’t either be a disrupter or be disrupted (or both) in the years ahead. Anyone who believes all the firms on today’s list of leading growth companies will still be there in five or ten years has a good chance of being proved wrong.

 

For investors, this means there’s a new world order. Words like “stable,” “defensive” and “moat” will be less relevant in the future. Much of investing will require more technological expertise than it did in the past. And investments made on the assumptions that tomorrow will look like yesterday must be subject to vastly increased scrutiny.

https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/the-winds-of-change

 

 

3. Efficiency is the Enemy

There’s a good chance most of the problems in your life and work come down to insufficient slack.

 

If you ever find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, sinking into stasis despite wanting to change, or frustrated when you can’t respond to new opportunities, you need more slack in your life.

 

Many organisations are obsessed with efficiency. They want to be sure every resource is utilised to its fullest capacity and everyone is sprinting around every minute of the day doing something. They hire expert consultants to sniff out the faintest whiff of waste. Personally, we view sleep, sickness, and burnout as unwelcome weaknesses and idolise those who never seem to succumb to them. This view, however, fails to recognize that efficiency and effectiveness are not the same thing.

 

Slack consists of excess resources. It might be time, money, people on a job, or even expectations. Slack is vital because it prevents us from getting locked into our current state, unable to respond or adapt because we just don’t have the capacity.

 

Too much slack is bad because resources get wasted and people get bored. But, on the whole, an absence of slack is a problem far more often than an excess of it

https://fs.blog/slack/

 

 

4. Why Your Brain Never Runs Out Of Problems To Find

Why do many problems in life seem to stubbornly stick around, no matter how hard people work to fix them? It turns out that a quirk in the way human brains process information means that when something becomes rare, we sometimes see it in more places than ever.

 

You can probably think of many similar situations in which problems never seem to go away, because people keep changing how they define them. This is sometimes called “concept creep,” or “moving the goalposts,” and it can be a frustrating experience. How can you know if you’re making progress solving a problem, when you keep redefining what it means to solve it?

 

It turns out that for your brain, relative comparisons often use less energy than absolute measurements. Human brains have likely evolved to use relative comparisons in many situations, because these comparisons often provide enough information to safely navigate our environments and make decisions, all while expending as little effort as possible.

https://www.all-about-psychology.com/why-your-brain-never-runs-out-of-problems-to-find.html

 

 

5. Sleeping well at night is not always the best investment advice

Selecting the right asset allocation is all about trade-offs and one variable is your appetite for risk. But figuring out what helps you sleep at night can be terrible advice for many investors.

 

I had numerous conversations with people who would have slept better at night if they could have sold out of their entire portfolio and went to cash during the depths of the market crash earlier this year. Had they done so they definitely wouldn’t be sleeping better now that stocks have recovered their losses.

 

The problem is your preference for risk often changes more than your tolerance for risk based on what’s happening in the markets.

 

You could hold your entire portfolio in cash and sleep like a baby for years only to realise later in life you’ve lost money to inflation over time. Or you could throw all of your money into only the best-performing fad companies at the moment and feel better about your positioning until those investments blow up in your face.

 

Most good investing should be at least a little uncomfortable at times.

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2020/10/some-money-investing-stuff-ive-changed-my-mind-about/

 

Weekend Reading - 14-Jan-22

 

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. If you like this collection, consider forwarding it to someone who you think will appreciate it.

 

You can sign up to https://www.getrevue.co/profile/intelsense to receive all blogs from me directly into your inbox.

1. Insecurity and envy drives markets

The Fear I see these days is a fear of becoming a relic of the past. A fear of seeing your peers catapult themselves ahead of you. A fear of missing out, which has been well documented and has become the spirit of the times we live in.

 

The type of fear that now drives most market activity (because it drives most market participants) is something different than the fear we’ve been accustomed to from reading about history. I would label this type of fear Insecurity. The fear of being left behind and looking like a fool. It’s no surprise that Have Fun Staying Poor or #HFSP has become one of the most enduring memes of the moment we’re in now. It’s the anti-Keep Calm and Carry On. Whenever you see people doing inexplicable things with their capital in the markets these days (public or private), the explanation is not as far from your grasp as you might think. Insecurity is probably the answer.

 

The other driving force in the markets, traditionally, has been Greed. I think we’re witnessing a variation on Greed that I would label Envy.

 

Envy will make you take wild risks with a portfolio. Especially when all you see around you are so many people you have such little regard for profiting off of things you know they themselves barely understand. The more exposure we have to the way others are investing, the more we begin to look at their returns as though that’s the appropriate benchmark. All sense of reason and perspective is left behind. If that asshole is doing it, I can do it better.

https://thereformedbroker.com/2021/10/21/the-new-fear-and-greed/

 

 

2. There's More to Investing Than Just Risk and Return

Investment researchers have created scores of metrics to help depict how well an investment has balanced risk and return: the Sharpe ratio, the Treynor ratio, the Sortino ratio, to name just a few. We also talk about how investments fit on the efficient frontier--how well they've compensated investors for the volatility they've assumed.

 

Meanwhile, attributes like whether an investment imparts peace of mind or requires minimal oversight can't be quantified because they're inherently subjective. You might derive peace of mind from knowing that your portfolio is positioned for long-term growth, whereas another investor's definition of peace of mind is more conventional. You might be OK with spending five hours a week researching investments; another investor might say that five hours a year is more time than he cares to give.

 

creating the right portfolio for you should involve some self-reflection on these softer issues, because optimizing your investment choices isn't just about risk and return. It's about creating a portfolio that can get you to your goals without interfering with the rest of your life. It's also likely that your views on these issues have evolved over time, so you may need to course-correct to ensure that your portfolio reflects your current thinking. The individual-stock-heavy portfolio that engaged you when you were younger may seem too complicated and labor-intensive--not to mention too risky--as retirement approaches.

https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1060406/theres-more-to-investing-than-just-risk-and-return

 

 

3. Price matters

This surely will sound quaint and stale to a few readers, but – and I’m sorry – the future value of a thing is ultimately based on the dividends the thing will eventually pay you, or someone to whom you are prepared to sell your shares. Whether the proxies for those dividends are cash flows, earnings, margins, sales, or the dividends themselves, alpha happens when expectations of those future dividends change.

 

That’s it. That’s the stock-picking game. Stocks are not pieces of art. They are not fiat money.  Cults of personality do not last forever in the stock market. Narratives break. Eventually, everyone figured out that Galileo was right. Eventually, everyone will figure out that Cathie Wood isn’t. And it won’t take as long either.

 

But for those making money on big investments in these particular securities as they go from unreasonably overpriced to preposterously overpriced, this is not investing. This is greater-fool speculation. Sure, this is fun (for the longs); but calling it anything else is pulling the wool over the eyes of clients, or perhaps over your own. 

 

What may even have started as a reasonable and strong fundamental reason for ownership must be tempered if the share price of the thing is 10x higher than it was when you first established your thesis. Price matters. There is a difference between a company and its share price. This gravity of this logic has not dropped on many market participants. But it will. It always does.

https://www.albertbridgecapital.com/post/a-memo-to-investors

 

4. The nothingness of money

Everyone knows that your bank account doesn’t go with you upon death. But for most of life, that knowledge is theoretical, meaning that it’s not real enough to influence your day-to-day behavior. The mere awareness of your mortality isn’t enough to cease your pursuit of wealth.

 

For most people, the Nothingness of Money strikes when the finish line is a few yards away. In this moment, a pursuit that once seemed all-consuming fades into the background. All that matters are the memories you have, the people you love, and the memories you can still make with them. The use of your finite time to squeeze out an extra dollar is laughable, as no one with a sound mind would expect that of you.

 

And finally, in this brief section of life, something profound happens. The Nothingness of Money is truly understood.

 

The core idea of retirement is this: You frontload your attention spent on money to generate wealth. You then offload your wealth to spend your attention on leisure, purpose, or love.

 

Retirement is our clever way of extending the Nothingness of Money out while we are healthy enough to appreciate it.

https://moretothat.com/the-nothingness-of-money/

 

5. Automate basic financial actions to avoid the "Ostrich Effect"

In behavioral economics, the "Ostrich Effect" refers to the tendency to avoid negative financial information. From a psychological standpoint, the Ostrich Effect is the result of the conflict between what our rational mind knows to be important and what our emotional mind anticipates will be painful.

 

The ostrich’s method for solving financial problems is to ignore them for as long as possible, and then to respond in utter panic and agonizing stress when they are finally forced to act. Not only does avoiding uncomfortable truth keep them from solving those problems: It compounds them.

 

Habits are hard to change. Give yourself grace and start small. Automate just one account. Pay just one bill. You know which baby step is the right one for you. Just do it. Take five minutes and do it now.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/loaded/201904/the-ostrich-effect

 

Weekend Reading - 7th Jan 2022

 

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. If you like this collection, consider forwarding it to someone who you think will appreciate it.

You can sign up to https://www.getrevue.co/profile/intelsense to receive all blogs from me directly into your inbox.

1. The world is irrational

The first step to accepting that some things don’t compute is realizing that the reason we have innovation and advancement is because we are fortunate to have people in this world whose minds work differently from yours. People like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, whose personalities are equal parts brilliant and absurd, and the absurd can’t be separated from the brilliant – you have to accept the full package. We’d never get anywhere if everyone viewed the world as a clean set of rational rules to follow.

 

The next is accepting that what’s rational to one person can be crazy to another. Everything would compute if everyone had the same time horizon, goals, ambitions, and risk tolerances. But they don’t. Panic selling stocks after they’ve declined 5% is a terrible idea if you’re a long-term investor and a career imperative if you’re a professional trader. There is no world in which every business or investing decision you see should align with your own view of the world.

 

Third is understanding the power of incentives. Bubbles are technically irrational, but the people who work in bubbles make so much money from them that there’s a powerful incentive to keep the music playing. They delude not only their customers, but themselves. Nothing gets people to look the other way like easy money.

 

Last is the power of stories over statistics. If you look, I think you’ll find that wherever information is exchanged – wherever there are products, companies, careers, politics, knowledge, education, and culture – you will find that the best story wins. Great ideas explained poorly can go nowhere while old or wrong ideas told compellingly can ignite a revolution.

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/does-not-compute/

 

2. The rule of awkward silence

Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos run two of the most valuable companies in the world. From the outside, they seem to exhibit very different personalities. But within their companies, both men are known for a fascinating practice: They each embrace the rule of awkward silence.

 

When faced with a challenging question, instead of answering, you pause and think deeply about how you want to answer. This is no short pause; rather, it involves taking several seconds (10, 20, or longer) to think things through before responding.

 

We live in a world that demands instant gratification. But there's a major problem with all of this instantaneous communication:  It doesn't leave time to think. Critical thinking calls for deep and careful consideration of a subject. It requires introspection and retrospection. It involves weighing and analyzing facts, and careful reasoning. And it results in making insightful connections. None of this is possible without time.

 

But when you embrace the rule of awkward silence, you steal back time. Time that used to be wasted on nonsense answers. Time that used to be wasted on telling another person what you think they want to hear, as opposed to what you truly believe.

https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/intelligent-minds-like-tim-cook-jeff-bezos-embrace-rule-of-awkward-silence-you-should-too.html

 

3. Sea ice and how it impacts the climate

One way that scientists monitor climate change is through the measure of sea ice extent. Sea ice extent is the area of ice that covers the Arctic Ocean at a given time. Sea ice plays an important role in reflecting sunlight back into space, regulating ocean and air temperature, circulating ocean water, and maintaining animal habitats.

 

Arctic sea ice minimum extent is now declining at a rate of 13% per decade. The pace is likely to accelerate because of climate change-induced warming and the ice-albedo feedback cycle. The albedo effect describes the white ice surface’s ability to reflect Earth-bound sunlight back to space.

 

Sea ice acts as a “blanket,” separating the ocean from the atmosphere. Every year, some ice survives the summer melt. Once winter hits, more water freezes and it becomes thicker and stronger “multiyear ice.”

 

Melting sea ice in the Arctic does not dramatically change sea level. Melting land ice, for example from the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets, does contribute to sea level rise. That’s because when land ice melts, it releases water that was previously trapped on land and adds to the water in the oceans.

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3122/five-facts-to-help-you-understand-sea-ice/

 

 

4. How Driverless Cars Will Change Our World

Self-driving vehicles are steadily becoming a reality despite the many hurdles still to be overcome – and they could change our world in some unexpected ways.

 

The promise of driverless technology has long been enticing. It has the potential to transform our experience of commuting and long journeys, take people out of high-risk working environments and streamline our industries. It's key to helping us build the cities of the future, where our reliance and relationship with cars are redefined – lowering carbon emissions and paving the way for more sustainable ways of living. And it could make our travel safer.

 

There will be challenges to tackle like regulations, rethinking the highway code, public perception, improving the infrastructure of our streets, towns, cities, insurance and the big question of ultimate liability for road accidents.

 

One new space we can expect to see driverless technology deployed in is high-risk environments, from nuclear plants to military settings, to limit the dangers to human life.

 

Much in the same way that electric charging stations have slowly entered car parks, side streets, and service stations, so too will autonomous vehicles eventually make their way into our everyday worlds. Years from now, we may well be wondering how we ever lived without them.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211126-how-driverless-cars-will-change-our-world

 

 

5. Influencer marketing: The new wave in marketing

Influencer Marketing has changed the entire course of how marketing is perceived now. Today, any campaign starts from setting an appropriate tone for the brand to getting the right influencers on board to maximize reach.

 

From celebrity endorsements to micro-influencers across multiple platforms, brands have worked their way up to rationalize every expenditure by reaching out to the right target audience. Earlier, influencer marketing was aimed to reach the masses via television ads or radio or newspaper ads, without giving a second thought to who the buyers are, but now even the trend has changed drastically. Brands have changed drastically.

 

Social media platforms like – Instagram, YouTube, and others, are among the chief platforms where an Influencer marketing campaign begins. And, it has been found out that 74% or more people discover new products or make a purchasing decision while using social media.

 

The Indian influencer marketing industry is estimated at $75-150 million a year, according to a digital marketing agency. Today, the Indian audiences are consuming more online content (images, videos, or blogs) than ever before, which explains the increase in reach and engagement of several brands, who are frequently creating content to allow their potential consumers to discover and interact with them on a daily basis.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/influencer-marketing-how-has-the-concept-evolved-since-its-inception/