YouGov neatly demonstrate how Americans see small subgroups as much larger than they actually are, while large subgroups are systematically underestimated.
For example on average people thought that muslims made up 27% of Americans when the true proportion is 1% or that gays and lesbians made up 30%, when the true number is 3%.
On the other hand “we find that people underestimate the proportion of American adults who are Christian (estimate: 58%, true: 70%) and the proportion who have at least a high school degree (estimate: 65%, true: 89%).”
Nearly 7% of venture capitalists (VCs) were previously founders.
This paper, using the VentureSource database, asks if this group is any good at investing?
Successful founder-VCs have investment success rates that are 6.5% higher than professional VCs.
If you are an unsuccessful founder-VC your investment success is actually 4% lower than professionals.
The reason isn’t down to deal quality but value add – “Using an instrumental variables approach to separate unobservable deal quality from value-add, we find that the outperformance of successful founder VCs is consistent with them adding more value post investment.“
Chart below (from this paper) is a meta analysis of “globally reconciled and methodologically harmonized” data on the environmental impact (from GHG emissions to eutrophication) of 40 major foods.
What is interesting is the range – even the best meat farms still outweigh the worst grains.
Compounding is very difficult for human minds to comprehend.
As the famous riddle goes:
“Imagine it’s 10:00 AM on a small pond with a single lily pad. If the number of lily pads on the pond doubles every minute, and the entire pond is full of lily pads by 11:00 AM, at what time is the pond half full of lily pads?“
Morgen Housel brings this up in his conversation with Tim Ferriss (worth a full listen) when he talks about Warren Buffett who’s real talent, when compared to other greats like Jim Simons, was not the level of investment returns (Simons’ are much higher) but their longevity. As he says “if Buffett had retired at age 60, like a normal person might, no one would’ve ever heard of him” (transcript).
This is a very useful resource for tracking what is going on in the Ukraine war.
Produced by The Institute for Study of War (ISW) it is a daily assessment (see under “Latest”, example here) of the situation on the ground along with a useful map (pictured).
Here is a video that time lapses all the maps since the invasion began.
This Substack (written by Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College) provides some very good analysis of the meta situation.
One angle that is key to watch for second order thinking is China. This was a really great piece to understand the China angle as was this (arguing that perhaps this crisis could push China back to collective leadership).
Fundamentals have been bad in biotech land, something that is reflecting in share prices and IPO performance (XBI has halved since peak).
Positive news flow among small and mid-cap biotechs, which hit 60% in 2020, has just fallen below 30%.
“But it’s not just small caps, it’s across the sector: Jefferies’ Michael Yee said of 45 major clinical readouts from large and small players, only 20% were positive.”
Clinical holds have also spiked – 2022 is off to a bad start (13 holds in 8 weeks) and could surpass the already bad 2021 (>50 vs. 30 average historically.
The full article offers some explanations of what is going on.
