A great podcast on how container shipping started and revolutionised the world by a historian who wrote the book on the subject.
“Container didn’t just happen. Its adoption required huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports that aspired to be on the leading edge of a new technology. It required years of high-stakes bargaining with two of the titans of organized labor, Harry Bridges and Teddy Gleason, as well as delicate negotiations on standards that made it possible for almost any container to travel on any truck or train or ship. Ultimately, it took McLean’s success in supplying U.S. forces in Vietnam to persuade the world of the container’s potential.“
A nice post reminding us, with supporting studies, that most forecasting isn’t very good whether it is recessions, GDP, interest rates, exchange rates etc.
And yet we persist – “To understand the extent of our forecasting fascination, I analysed the websites of three management consultancies looking for predictions with time frames ranging from 2025 to 2050. Whilst one prediction may be published multiple times, the size of the numbers still shocked me. Deloitte’s site makes 6904 predictions. McKinsey & Company make 4296. And Boston Consulting Group, 3679. In total, these three companies’ websites include just shy of 15,000 predictions stretching out over the next 30 years.“
Alta Fox have done a massive analysis of all the best performing stocks over the last five years.
Overall – they find that financially healthy companies with advantageous business positioning tend to do better.
Acquisitions are a feature of these top performing stocks (perhaps because of the five year time frame).
The analysis is a bit too micro cap focussed and only concentrates on Australia, Europe and North America and excludes some sectors (e.g. materials), but is nonetheless useful.
On culture – “part of daily life at Netflix with a daily Circle of Feedback and annual written and live 360 Assessments, in which you meet with the team to get ripped apart.“
Bessemer Venture Partners are famous for publishing their anti-portfolio.
Recently they took to learning from their success and published a series of memos from some of their most successful venture investments.
“One pattern that consistently emerges is that Bessemer’s best investment decisions centered on people. In retrospect, the early products themselves are barely recognizable today. Rather, passionate, analytical and relentless founders zigged and zagged their way to that elusive “product-market fit”, and these memos provide a glimpse of those winning entrepreneurs before they were famous.“
“Airbnb spending is running a whopping 75% higher than this time last year according to Edison Trends, based on a panel of spending data including more than 65,000 Airbnb transactions.“
