Adrian Lowcock, head of personal investing at Willis Owen, summed it up when he told the Financial Times: “We have seen the complete demise of the most famous fund manager the UK has seen for years… This collapse is on a par with the implosion of New Star at the height of the financial crisis, and it will shake the funds industry to its core.”
We think this article is unfair (1) It was not just a few lone journalists but many fund managers, often in private, voiced concerns about Woodford especially the use of a barbell approach, high % of illiquid (or private) investments, use of leverage, high % ownership in shares, complicated holding structures etc. (2) The industry has suffered because of Woodford and has not gained. In any way. (3) The pressures described are not new and regulation has relentlessly moved in the direction of reforming the industry. It is not flawless.
Try see if you can beat the market by buying and selling (once each) in any given randomly selected 10-year period from 1978.
A more sophisticated version, but with worse UI, covering 1950-2018 is found here. You can buy/sell several times and decide to use history or a random selection of daily historic returns (Monte-Carlo).
Worth reading – after all this is the man in charge of nearly 40% of US eCommerce as well as AWS (Amazon Web Services) – the infrastructure most start-ups run on.
A gem – Bezos has given $42m of funding for a clock – The Clock of the Long Now – on his ranch that will tell time accurately for 10,000 years.
“The upcoming arrival of services like Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max, and Peacock is increased competition, but they are still small compared to linear TV … In our view, the likely outcome from the launch of these new services will be to accelerate the shift from linear TV to on demand consumption of entertainment. Just like the evolution from broadcast TV to cable, these once-in-a-generation changes are very large and open up big, new opportunities for many players.”
Seriously interesting article on Calouste Gulbenkian and negotiating.
If you haven’t heard of him he was the richest man in the world in the 1950s by virtue of negotiating “5%” royalties on Middle Eastern (especially Iraqi) oil developed by western companies.
Lessons include never put all demands upfront but make demands step by step, often right at the last moment.
Make agreements so complex that non one will dispute them later.
“An S-1 is meant to be a bland financial document, but WeWork’s took a different direction. With Adam’s encouragement, Rebekah became unusually involved in the artistic presentation of the document. “The traditional approach to producing an S-1 is bankers and lawyers hashing this out, but the process was continually usurped by Rebekah’s involvement,” one executive said, echoing a sentiment expressed by multiple people who worked on the project. “She treated it like it was the September issue of Vogue.” “
A fascinating piece on how the nutrition of the world’s plants is changing because of climate change.
“Across nearly 130 varieties of plants and more than 15,000 samples collected from experiments over the past three decades, the overall concentration of minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc and iron had dropped by 8 percent on average. The ratio of carbohydrates to minerals was going up. The plants, like the algae, were becoming junk food.“
