Insightful FT Alphaville post on short reports (“activist short selling”).
It builds on a recent paper where “two academics studied corporate responses to 351 short-reports published on US-listed companies between 1996 to 2018 in an attempt to discover if a company’s reaction is as important as the market’s when a report is released.”
It seems that companies that launch internal investigations as a response have the worst outcomes – 383% higher chance it is a fraud.
“It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being skeptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential. Of course we must know the difference between skepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort of twins.”
Comprehensive report with loads of stats on “whatpeople in the UK are doing online, how they are served by online content providers and platforms, and their experiences of using the internet, alongside business models and industry trends.“
71% of all online time is spent on mobiles now, yet half of over 75 year olds don’t use the internet at all.
39% of online time by adults was spent on Google or Facebook owned sites, and these two control 79% of UK online ad revenue.
This dataset tracks the flow of talent in AI around the world.
The chart shows the top 25 institutions for AI research.
“The United States has a large lead over all other countries in top-tier AI research, with nearly 60% of top-tier researchers working for American universities and companies. The US lead is built on attracting international talent, with more than two-thirds of the top-tier AI researchers working in the United States having received undergraduate degrees in other countries.”
A data rich post about UK housing with some gloomy predictions.
Pictured is a chart of mortgage approvals – in blue since the three years leading up to the financial crisis and red since the three years before lockdown.
Mortgage approvals are “the leading indicator” for housing transactions and it does not bode well.
An insightful post about how the passion economy will disrupt traditional competitors.
Passion economy is the ability of “new digital platforms enable people to earn a livelihood in a way that highlights their individuality.“
Disruption happens as “these workers can develop new products/services that serve previous non-consumers and over-served consumers. This means that across different industries, new Passion Economy platforms have the potential to disrupt incumbents.“
As opposed to some video games, where probabilities are tweaked to psychologically hook players, in poker “the probabilities are what they are: they don’t accommodate. Instead, they force you to confront the wrongness of your intuitions if you are to succeed. “Part of what I get out of a game is being confronted with reality in a way that is not accommodating to my incorrect preconceptions,””
This from a brilliant article by a psychologist learning to play poker.
Our beliefs are skewed because small samples don’t mirror large ones, that this leads to the emergence of the gamblers fallacy, but perhaps this bias actually has positive advantages through an internal locus of control and our understanding of luck.
All have clear relevance to investing.
For a full 1 hour podcast from the author – head here.
This series is one of the better when it comes to understanding what has gone wrong for value investors.
The first looks into whether value is actually cheap.
“The evidence brings us full circle to Arnott’s observation that the problem with the Value Factor has not been the absolute performance of Value stocks. The problem has been shorting the Glamour stocks“.
The second, propose something very intriguing – “that looking through the lens of optionality reveals that the source of excess returns to factors are not a function of the securities themselves, but rather the rules of portfolio construction and the embedded optionality these rules create“
