Interesting lessons here on buying into bubbles, reflexivity (that markets can influence the events they anticipate), instinct (the famous back pain he gets) and mistakes.
“He once asked Byron Wien, an investment strategist and friend, why he went to work every day. Why not work on the days when it makes sense to do so, he asked, when there is something special to be done?
Wien replied: “George, one of the differences between you and me is you know when those days are and I don’t.”
Always worth a flick through the latest presentation – titled Superman – from Jeffery Gundlach.
This is an interesting slide showing that twin deficits (current account and budget) lead the US Dollar exchange rate by 2 years – suggesting downward pressure on the latter.
A must read article on the rise of alternative data in the investment management industry from the Man Group Institute.
This chart shows how the supply of this data has exploded.
Demand has also followed.
The article contains plenty of warnings and things to be mindful of including – methodology, data quality, historic length, data lag, various biases, scope, governance and crowding.
One of the better investment books around is exactly about that.
A personal favourite was when Stanley Druckenmiller got himself involved in Tech stocks at the top of the dot-com bubble.
“Druckenmiller knew exactly what he was doing – he just couldn’t stop himself. ‘I bought $6 billion worth of tech stocks, and in six weeks I had lost $3 billion in that one play. You asked me what I learned. I didn’t learn anything. I already knew that I wasn’t supposed to do that. I was just an emotional basketcase and couldn’t help myself. So maybe I learned not to do it again, but I already knew that.‘”
Brookfield have declared a 7.3% stake in British Land (BLND) – the UK property company.
This is interesting as Brookfield in the early 2000s bought a stake in Canary Wharf Group eventually, in 2014, taking it over (together with QIA via Songbird).
An interesting post taking a step back and understanding the investment landscape as a game including appreciating the other players and stages of development.
“Each year around 100,000 new college graduates apply for internships at investment banks. Around 10,000 get a spot. After three years of banking boot camp, roughly 4,000 of these analysts want to become investors. Add in some analysts from management consulting and accounting firms, plus a handful of lawyers, and you get around 6,000 talented candidates interviewing for buy-side positions. About one in six gets a seat. So imagine a new cohort of roughly 1,000 twenty-somethings joining 15,000 existing analysts and portfolio managers at hedge funds, and another 30,000 long-only investors.”
