Third Point Letter

  • In case you missed it – Loeb’s latest missive from Q1.
  • His purchase of UBS is interesting – though CS will undoubtedly have more skeletons (see here) and lose more AuM (as clients diversify), the uplift to UBS book value (74% accretive, putting UBS post deal on 0.74x P/TBV), state loss guarantees (CHF 9bn post first 5bn), and liquidity provision (CHF 100bn) are all positives.

Greece

  • The Greek economy is doing rather well, and starting to peel away in terms of growth.
  • Barclays, via FT Alphaville, argue it might be entering a third positive “megacycle”.
  • This analysis agrees – “Greece is growing, investment is booming, employment prospects are improving, the number of businesses is moving up, salaries are increasing, and the country is becoming less poor, not more“.

Crowding in Biotech Development

  • “An analysis of biopharma pipelines shows that the average number of assets per target investigated has more than doubled: 3 assets/target in 2000 to 7/target today. The number of assets in clinical development is outpacing the number of biological approaches, particularly in oncology.”
  • Source.

AI Moat

  • This leaked memo from Google has been doing the rounds last two weeks.
  • The jist is that no one has a moat in AI.
  • The arguments boil down to the idea that there has been so much innovation that open source will win.
  • Ben Thompson lists a few counterarguments about why this might not be true.
  • The other point, mentioned by a friend, is having intellectual property infringement experience as a key competitive advantage.

Autoimmune Disease

  • This large (22m records) cross sub-discipline study found that nearly one in ten people (13% for women and 7% for men) have an autoimmune disease – much higher than historic estimates.
  • this “research also confirmed that some autoimmune diseases tend to cluster together (for example, one person with a first autoimmune disease is more likely to develop a second autoimmune disease than someone without autoimmune disease), however at a much larger scale and for a much larger set of autoimmune diseases than previous studies.
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