A bit off topic for Snippet but these guiding principles from Jim Simons, the founder of one of the most successful funds ever – Renaissance Technologies, are worth a quick absorb.
Wide ranging discussion including thoughts on trading charges (see table page 5), tirade against value investing (page 7), and comment on Woodford (page 10) .
This is a chart of the top app downloads in US. Check out Disney.
“The launch of Disney+ in mid-November was unprecedented in the U.S. Its 31 million downloads in Q4 2019 was more than double the total for the next closest app, TikTok.”
It was still top despite launching Nov 12 – some way into the quarter.
Source: Sensor Tower (lots of good app stats inside report).
This chart from Soc Gen shows that over the past two years out of a total of 16,000 public companies world wide only 20% have outperformed the S&P 500.
It really gets to the crux of the country’s success.
In 1993 they ran a $20bn deficit and now that is a surplus of over $200bn (inflation adjusted).
Worth a read for any economist and puts into perspective the trade-war going on right now.
“The takeaway — from this whole 6,000 word essay — is that Germany has done insanely well for itself since the creation and adoption of the Euro and the European Single Market by pursuing a strategy of Export-driven Industrial production that is considered impossible in any other developed, high-GDP, high-population, high-wage-paying nation.“
“42 Silicon Valley is a college-level, tuition-free, computer programming school with a peer-to-peer learning environment. Learn the skills you need here to begin your career as a Software Engineer, for free.“
“The rise of AirPods, smart speakers, and other wearable devices may not signal the onset of a true platform shift, but it undoubtedly represents a transformational evolution in the way we will consume media — and this emerging paradigm of distributed, “eyes up” device interaction directly benefits audio more than other content categories.“
An interesting perspective on how to invest in winners.
“There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor. Before going any further, I should point out that this is a particularly hard time to invest in startups—it’s easier right now to be a capital-taker than a capital-giver.”
