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Friday 16 August 2019

Weekend Reading - Some Interesting Stuff

1) Americans are now buying survival bunkers for themselves
Americans have, for generations prepared themselves for society’s collapse. They built fallout shelters during the Cold War and basement supply caches ahead of Y2K. But in recent years, personalized disaster prep has grown into a multimillion-dollar business, fueled by a seemingly endless stream of new and revamped threats, from climate change to terrorism, cyberattacks and civil unrest.
“Fear sells even better than sex,” Professor Hoopes said. “If you can make people afraid, you can sell them all kinds of stuff,” he added, “and that includes bunkers.”

2) Keeping calm under stress - from those whose accomplishments will blow your mind
This elite organization was founded in 1904 and has 3,000 invitation-only guests. To qualify for nomination, you need to have done something truly earth-shattering (literally, for those members who study earthquakes). At their annual dinner this year, for example, 250 people had been to the North Pole, 150 to the South Pole, an odd dozen had summited Everest, two had been to the bottom of the Mariana Trench (the deepest point in the ocean), a bunch had orbited the Earth, and six people—six!—had been to the Moon.
Last month, the group held its inaugural Global Exploration Summit in Lisbon. It was the kind of conference where you’d overhear stories that started with “So, when we were coming back to Earth…”

3) How US Fed policy created the last 2 boom and bust cycle
The central bank cannot control the economy. The idea of discretionary monetary policy is a flawed concept stemming from Keynesian ideas of government intervention in the economy. It creates a boom and bust cycle. Until central bankers abandon the boom and bust cycle idea, things are not going to change—there is no "correct" rate hike or decrease. Once a boom occurs (tech bubble), a bust happens when interest rates are raised (2001 downturn). In order to get the country of the downturn, another boom is created (housing bubble), which also leads to a bust (2008 crisis).

4) The great companies of the future is not going to look like those of the past(!!)
As tech companies move into finance, as the fortunes poured into health research reap a new harvest of breakthroughs, as our dependence on fossil fuels for transport and energy disappears, as robots eliminate mindless work, the consensus is that we will genuinely move into a brave new world of ever-better modern conveniences. But while this sounds attractive and exciting, we should remember that multi-year investment trends are like very big dogs: they seldom live past their first decade. Instead, the historical precedents would suggest that the top 10 companies of 2030 are more likely to reflect either the growth of capitalism into new territories (India? Latin America? China? South East Asia?) or the fear that there won’t be enough for everybody.

On this point, the Mayans used to believe that history was made up of recurring cycles of 52 years; a notion which fits nicely with the popular belief that people avoid making their parents’ mistakes, only to repeat their grandparents’ errors. So perhaps in 2030 the market will be primed for a return of the belief that democracy can only lead to inflation, as politicians chase votes with barely-dry cash?

5) More food will be delivered than eaten in restaurants
In 2020, more than half of restaurant spending is projected to be “off premise”—not inside a restaurant. In other words, spending on deliveries, drive-throughs, and takeaway meals will soon overtake dining inside restaurants, for the first time on record. According to the investment group Cowen and Company, off-premise spending will account for as much as 80 percent of the industry’s growth in the next five years.



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Friday 2 August 2019

Weekly Reading: Some Interesting Stuff


1) The cure for baldness is here
I have always maintained that anyone who can find the cure for two problems will become billionaires - baldness and obesity. Looks like one of the problems is coming to an end. And technology is intervening here as well.

The physiology of balding has long vexed even the most entrepreneurial of scientists. Despite a rare confluence of commercial forces and scientific interest, generating new hair remains outside the realm of the possible. This could be changing, though—and not owing to new packaging of the same old medicines. Recently a series of scientific publications have explored advances that involve both stem-cell research and 3-D printing, with the goal of cloning a person’s actual hair and then inserting it into his or her scalp—in tremendous, unlimited quantities.
 Using cells from a person’s own body minimizes the risk that the immune system will reject the hair transplants 

2) The big business of sleep
The Western world is currently undergoing an epidemic of poor sleep – fueled by everything from auto-play streaming services to the rise in millennial anxiety. And yet, new and alarming research is telling us more than ever about its dangers, from higher rates of heart disease to doubling our risk of cancer. But now, coming to the rescue is a £100 billion sleeping giant, as tech titans and start-ups repackage rest as the ultimate wellness cure.

3) Fungi are getting ready to kill us! (And we are helping them!!!)
Candida auris, a fungus that can kill anyone who comes into close contact with a carrier, was first identified in 2009 in a Japanese patient with an ear infection. It then started showing up in hospitals in Asia, Africa and South America in patients without a clear link — and no one could figure out why.

The majority of fungi grow well in ambient temperatures but only a small percentage can tolerate our body temperature. The concern is that the higher ambient temperatures caused by global warming will eventually lead some kinds of fungus to breach the thermal restriction zone, what Casadevall explains is a zone that is so hot that it typically keeps most fungal species off our body. Without those defences working, Candida auris and other fungal species that adapt to higher temperatures can infect and possibly kill humans.

4) Ruchir Sharma on why a US Fed rate cut can be dangerous
The US Federal Reserve appears poised to cut interest rates for the first time since the global financial crisis a decade ago. Adjusted for inflation, the Fed’s benchmark rate is now just half a per cent and the cost of borrowing has rarely been closer to free, but the clamour for more easy money keeps growing.

Everyone wants the recovery to last and more easy money seems like the obvious way to achieve that goal. With trade wars threatening the global economy, Federal Reserve governors say rate cuts are needed to keep the slowdown from spilling into the United States, and to prevent doggedly low inflation from sliding into outright deflation.

In this environment, cutting rates could hasten the outcome that the Fed is trying to avoid: a debt-fueled market bubble, followed by collapse and an economic downturn with falling prices – much like Japan in the 1990s. Japan showed that central banks can print all the money they want, but can’t dictate where it will go. Easy credit could not force over-indebted consumers to spend, and much of it ended up going to finance “bridges to nowhere” and the rise of debt-laden “zombie companies” that still weigh on Japan’s economy.

5) Urjit Patel's insights into the Indian banking system
Indian funding model is bank-led; hence, the banking sector health has to be a priority area.
The dominance of bank-led funding is slowly changing, but, expected to remain important, plus there is interconnectedness between banks & non-banks.

There is a significant divergence in the performance of private banks (PBs) and government banks (GBs) in terms of operations & financial indicators. GBs have a high ratio of non-operating expenses to earnings compared to PBs. High-cost structure of GBs is borne by economy; maybe impinging transmission of policy rate changes.

As many as 90 per cent of frauds occurred in GBs while the share of PBs is about 10 per cent.
In Indian banks, capital is low relative to NPAs compared to global standards.

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Friday 26 July 2019

Weekly Reading: Some Interesting Stuff


1) The psychology of prediction
Anything that Morgan Housel writes is worth reading.
This article describes 12 common flaws, errors, and misadventures that occur in people’s heads when predictions are made.

2) Electric vehicles in EU have to sound like traditional vehicles
I don't know if when cars were first introduced if it was required to sound or look like horses :-) But, new electric vehicles will have to feature a noise-emitting device, under an EU rule coming into force on Monday. It follows concerns that low-emission cars and vans are too quiet, putting pedestrians at risk because they cannot be heard as they approach. All new types of four-wheel electric vehicle must be fitted with the device, which sounds like a traditional engine.

3) Mauboussin on what he would tell his younger self (~read more)
The motto of the Royal Society – “nullius in verba” – roughly translates to “take nobody’s word for it.” Basically, the founders were urging their colleagues to avoid deferring to authority and to verify statements by considering facts. They wanted to make sure everyone would think for themselves.
In the world of investing, that means constant learning—which entails constant reading. So I would encourage my younger self to read widely, to constantly learn, and to develop points of view independent of what others say and based on facts. Specifically, I would recommend developing the habit of reading. Constantly ask good questions and seek to answer them.

4) How global money laundering operates
Corruption isn’t something that happens only in hardscrabble countries led by dictators and plagued by instability. It happens everywhere. Public money is stolen and siphoned away from poor countries at the expense of citizens, while private money is invested in wealthy nations where the well-heeled bask in luxury.
The global financial system, the international financial system, these offshore centers of finance essentially provide an open door from their countries to the world, which means that they can just walk out of their countries with as much money as they like, stash that money offshore, then spend it without anyone realizing that it’s them.
Money moves freely from country to country; law and law enforcement can’t. It becomes very easy if you’re very wealthy to just put your money wherever you like. That means you put your money where it will be treated best, where you will get less scrutiny for it.

5) The anatomy of a fraud
Be wary of companies that are all story and no numbers. If the story is so great, shouldn’t there be plenty of numbers to back it up?


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Friday 19 July 2019

Weekend Reading - Some Interesting Stuff


1) Pay attention to your attention
I felt that I had to pay attention to my attention, that I had to focus on my focus. It was new. It wasn’t something I’d had to think about since I was a kid.
The same way we discovered that the sedentary lifestyles of the 20th century required us to physically exert ourselves and work our bodies into healthy shape, I believe we’re on the cusp of discovering a similar necessity for our minds. We need to consciously limit our own comforts. We need to force our minds to strain themselves, to work hard for their information, to deprive our attention of the constant stimulation that it craves.
The same way the consumer economy of the 20th century called upon us to invent the nutritional diet, I believe that the attention economy of the 21st century calls upon us to invent an attention diet. 
The first and most important goal of an attention diet should be to consciously limit the number of distractions we’re exposed to.
Basically, the name of the game is quality over quantity. Because in a world with infinite information and opportunity, you don’t grow by knowing or doing more, you grow by the ability to correctly focus on less.


2) Tax on BigTech by France - will others follow?
France has approved a digital services tax despite threats of retaliation by the US, which argues that it unfairly targets American tech giants. The 3% tax will be levied on sales generated in France by multinational firms like Google and Facebook. The French government has argued that such firms headquartered outside the country pay little or no tax. At present, they are able to pay little or no corporate tax in countries where they do not have a large physical presence. They declare most of their profits where they are headquartered. The European Commission estimates that on average traditional businesses face a 23% tax rate on their profits within the EU, while internet companies typically pay 8% or 9%.France has long argued that taxes should be based on digital, not just physical presence. It announced its own tax on big technology firms last year after EU-wide efforts stalled.

3) Is FaceApp, the new sensation, safe or is it collecting information about you to be able to misuse later?
Wireless Lab, the company behind FaceApp, has very expansive Terms of Service that raise a growing number of privacy concerns. Section 5 of the Terms of Service “grants FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed, without compensation to you.”
“You just sent them close up, well-lit images of your face,” he continues. “Now, they know your name and vital details and can create an annotated image record of you as a human. The next model would have no problem triangulating and verifying and adding more data from other sources like LinkedIn which would then give them your education, your work history, skies the limit.”

4) Cordless charging of EV batteries - now a reality
If the future of mobility is destined to be electric, CEO Alex Gruzen of WiTricity wants to make sure it’s cordless, too. WiTricity, a Massachusetts-based start-up, designs systems that deliver power wirelessly to car batteries using a technology known as magnetic resonance.
Electric vehicles are now the single largest consumer of battery-watt hours. EVs have surpassed cell phones and all consumer electronics. That’s kind of remarkable, given the billions of phones sold every year.
This summer, they hit a major milestone: for the first time, a global automaker, BMW, launched a plug-in hybrid car featuring their wireless-charging technology.

5) What is wrong with India's PSU banking system in the backdrop of 50 years of bank nationalization
Bank nationalization was a by-product of a power struggle between Gandhi and rivals within the Indian National Congress party that was only superficially about economics. 
Gandhi wanted to isolate her rivals, including her finance minister, and force them out of the government. So, she maneuvered them into declaring that the public sector was inefficient and should be dismantled. Then she herself took the opposite position, nationalizing the banks and leaving her enemies with no option but to go. It was a matter of intra-party politics, not poverty relief.
The Harvard Business School economist Shawn Cole found that “while nationalization initially spurred financial development and caused unprecedented amounts of credit to flow to agriculture, this came at a cost of lower quality intermediation. Moreover, a more than doubling of agricultural credit to villages led to no measurable increase in agricultural investment. Even the increase in credit was not sustained.”
The effect on industry, meanwhile, was clearly negative. Banks, once nationalized, became risk-averse and hidebound, rarely lending to new firms. Under-lending became chronic; manufacturers found themselves severely short of credit. Bank officials did not have to care about finding and evaluating profitable firms. Instead they lent to those companies selected, for whatever reason, by their political bosses.
Such cronyism led to periodic bad loan crises that required bailouts by the banks’ owners, the taxpayers. The same dynamic continues to this day: The last Indian budget set aside 700 billion rupees ($10.2 billion) for recapitalizing public sector banks. This means a total of 2.7 trillion rupees has been infused into the state-controlled banking sector since 2017. Even so, banks are still burdened with bad assets and reluctant to lend.



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Friday 12 July 2019

Weekly Reading - Some Interesting Stuff

1) Why plants don't die from cancer?
I recently watched the fantastic documentary series on Chernobyl. I would recommend it to anyone interested.
Chernobyl’s exclusion zone isn’t devoid of life. Wolves, boars and bears have returned to the lush forests surrounding the old nuclear plant. And when it comes to vegetation, all but the most vulnerable and exposed plant life never died in the first place, and even in the most radioactive areas of the zone, vegetation was recovering within three years.
Critically, unlike animal cells, almost all plant cells are able to create new cells of whatever type the plant needs. This is why a gardener can grow new plants from cuttings, with roots sprouting from what was once a stem or leaf.
All of this means that plants can replace dead cells or tissues much more easily than animals, whether the damage is due to being attacked by an animal or to radiation.

2) The downfall of Ranbaxy
The Ranbaxy story remains a fascinating one for me. How in a span of a few years, how the two Singh brothers managed to completely destroyed a reputed business is a lesson to be learnt for all.
In its race for profit, Ranbaxy had lied to regulators, falsified data, and endangered patient safety in almost every country where it sold drugs. Ranbaxy had not properly tested the stability of almost any drugs on the US market. The most basic good manufacturing practices require continuous monitoring of drug quality. 

3) Chinese private enterprises start stuttering
We’ve been smacked by roaring trains of nonsense this year. In April, drugmaker Kangmei Pharmaceutical Co. said that it overstated cash holdings by $4.4 billion, due to an accounting “error.” Kangde Xin Composite Material Group Co. didn’t skip a beat, telling us its auditor could find no trace of a 12.2 billion yuan ($1.8 billion) bank deposit.  “Qualitative factors are playing an increasing role” when assessing Chinese enterprises, S&P Global Ratings wrote in June. Put more bluntly: Firms may look great on paper, but the cash you see on their balance sheets may not even be there. 
A loss of investor confidence is the last thing private enterprises need as the economy stutters. With banks reluctant to lend, stock and bond offerings remain their key funding channels.

4) EV battery technology (for the uninitiated!)
There are, essentially, three problems to solve in order for batteries to truly transform our lives: power, energy, and safety.
In common parlance, people use “energy” and “power” interchangeably, but it’s important to differentiate between them when talking about batteries. Power is the rate at which energy can be released.
The article discusses the developments of battery technology and explains it well for laymen.

5) Brian Lara scores a half-century
Now, that the World Cup is over and we are all disappointed, let's go down memory lane with one of the greatest batsmen in world cricket - Brian Lara.

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Friday 5 July 2019

Weekend Reading - Some Interesting Stuff


1) Will the DMart story play out like Aldi?
when Walmart’s US CEO Greg Foran invokes words like “fierce,” “good” and “clever” in speaking almost admiringly about one of his competitors, he’s not referring to Amazon. Foran is describing Aldi, the no-frills German discount grocery chain that’s growing aggressively in the United States and reshaping the industry along the way. Aldi has built a cult-like following. When it enters a new town, it’s not uncommon for hundreds of people to turn out for the grand opening. The allure is all in the rock-bottom prices, which are so cheap that Aldi often beats Walmart at its own low-price game.
There’s no secret to how Aldi keeps its prices so low: The company strips down the shopping experience in an unapologetically and brutally efficient way.

2) Or will it grow up to be like Costco?
I am reading up on the retail companies after a friend insisted I study Dmart. I am fascinated by Costco. I have shopped a few times there but never bothered to learn its history or to track its story.
Costco is an unlikely fashion retailer, but has somehow managed to become a fashion powerhouse.
Costco’s 85 million members, who pay an annual fee starting at $60 to gain access to goods at bargain prices, are filling their baskets with $70 North Face jackets and $13 Jessica Simpson jeans, along with bulk salmon and pasta. The company generated $7 billion in sales annually in clothes and footwear, which is more than Old Navy, Neiman Marcus, or Ralph Lauren. Its fashion revenue has been growing at a rate of about 9% a year for the past four years, which is faster than its food or electronics business.

3) How to be happy?
When we first get something that’s awesome, it feels really awesome. But then we get used to it pretty quickly. This phenomenon is what psychologists call “hedonic adaptation.
The prescriptions?
One was to spend time and money on things that don’t last as long—that is, things that are harder to adapt to. What this ends up translating to is the by now well-known consumerist commandment to “buy experiences, not things.” 
The other was to set aside time to be grateful for what you already have. This may come in the form of a gratitude journal or a period of brief reflection, and could be as basic as acknowledging the luxury of taking a hot shower or having a choice about what to eat for dinner. 

4) R3 pontificates on a range of issues
Raghuram Rajan discusses a vast range of issues. He discusses globalisation, the rise of nationalistic politics across the world, migration, adapting to new skills, welfare systems,
Very good read and practically not possible to summarize.

5) When you are a victim of your own success
You may be aware of Kleenex, Velcro and ChapStick, but what about escalator? Or dumpster? Linoleum, zipper, trampoline? All of these are (or were) trademarks of companies whose products were so successful that they came to represent an entire category. And it can actually cause quite a problem for those companies.
“When something becomes so pervasive in everyday society as a result of its own fame, there’s an argument that it no longer represents the brand, it almost represents the action,” Mr. Cohen said. “So as a result of that, in trademark law, you cannot trademark things that are descriptive or generic in nature.”
Bayer Co. v. United Drug Co. was a seminal case in which Bayer lost its trademark for Aspirin to what experts now refer to as “genericide.” That 1921 case set the table for the modern standard that courts currently follow: If a brand name is understood by the public to refer broadly to a category of goods and services rather than a brand’s specific good or service, a company may be at risk of losing its trademark. Escalator, cellophane, and laundromat have all lost their trademark status to genericide.

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Friday 28 June 2019

Weekly Reading - Some Interesting Stuff


1) One business where Amazon failed
Amazon plans to shutter its four-year-old Amazon Restaurants delivery service in the US this month. Amazon started the food-delivery service as on-demand meals were becoming big business for tech startups, with companies like Postmates, DoorDash, Caviar, and Uber Eats competing to deliver food from restaurants to consumers. Others, like Sprig and Maple, went further, vying to both prepare and deliver freshly cooked meals. In the US, Amazon Restaurants was available for free to customers with a $119-a-year Prime account.
Restaurants aren’t the first delivery-based business to evade Amazon, which is otherwise a master of logistics. The company has famously struggled to make online grocery-delivery work, with Amazon Fresh still a niche player more than 10 years after its launch.
Food delivery is a tough business with complex logistics, labor practices that are often poor, and notoriously thin margins. Many of the hottest delivery companies in Silicon Valley just a few years ago have since gone out of business.


2)  A real simple guide to the controversial paper by Arvind Subramanian
This is a very well-articulated, yet simple article on what Arvind Subramanian has talked about in his paper on GDP mis-representation. A must-read.


3) Chennai is facing an unprecedented water crisis; and it can spread to all of India, unless we start acting fast
Rains have become more erratic because of climate change. That, coupled with a delayed arrival of the seasonal monsoon, which usually comes in June, has all but dried up Chennai's water supply. Government data show that the storage level in the four lakes combined is less than one-hundredth of what it was at this time last year. A severe heat wave gripping most of India, including Chennai, has aggravated conditions.
What's happening in Chennai could easily happen anywhere across India
Public institutions are suffering. Hospitals and nursing homes are charging more for services to cover the increased cost of water, according to the local press. There are also reports that toilets at schools are dirty due to a lack of water.
One thing that could have possibly averted this acute water shortage? Rainwater harvesting.
In 2002, the government of Tamil Nadu passed legislation that mandated rainwater-harvesting structures on all buildings, including private homes, in the city. The goal: to capture rainwater and store it for later use. It was a revolutionary idea. When the city got hit with heavy monsoon rains a few years later, rainwater harvesting raised the water table enough to last the city until 2016.


4) Understanding the psychological drivers behind the mistake made by Bill Ackman on Herbalife
Although this article does not deal with the psychology, it does provide the narrative of what happened in the Herbalife deal. I was thinking on the errors made by Bill Ackman. Incentive caused bias, endowment bias, commitment and consistency bias scream at me. That is why it is never a good idea to take a public stand on a stock and make its success a matter of one's own ego.


5) JP Morgan's view on how to navigate a cycle which may be peaking
JP Morgan is not suggesting that US is getting into a recession yet believe that investors should start taking precautions. Moving to higher quality bonds and equities is the first and most important step. Looking at investments from a yield perspective and moderating capital appreciation expectations is the next. The third is to look where the growth is. Trade war, global manufacturing slowdown and liquidity in markets are all marked as risks.

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