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FRED is the St Louis Federal Reserve’s economic data service. It is a really useful data resource on the US economy. You can set up a dashboard of your favourite economic statistics.
Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Q3 survey of UK commercial property is out this week. “The Q3 Survey results point to a deterioration in sentiment over the period, with 62% of respondents now sensing the market is in the downturn phase of the property cycle . “A lot of this due to Brexit fears.
This is an interesting start up – Lambda School . They teach you coding at no upfront cost. Once you graduate they take 17% of your total pay for two years if it is at least $50k per annum (payments capped at $30k). A very interesting model, read more about it here .
An interesting infographic of the investment performance of components of the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index . As pointed out here not all of these are actually “investible assets”. The key issue is liquidity – can you actually sell?
Major asset classes this year are set to produce the highest Sharpe ratio since 1990. Sharpe Ratio is the return on an asset divided by the risk (measured as standard deviation) i.e. return per unit of risk taken. h/t isabelnet.com .
You have probably never heard of this man. Yet he has co-written and co-produced 73 US Top 10 singles. 22 of these have gone to No 1. He is third must successful songwriter behind … well, try and see if you can guess who the top two song writers in US Chart History are. Answer and a rare interview here .
Grub Investor Letter after their recent profit warning (and -43% fall in the shares) is worth a read. We have previously pointed out how alternative data was suggesting competitors were beating Grub. The letter points out how the online takeout market is getting a lot more competitive. “Furthermore, we believe online diners are becoming more promiscuous … our newer diners are increasingly coming to us already having ordered on a competing online platform, and our existing diners are increasingly ordering from multiple platforms … the easy wins in the market are disappearing a little more quickly than we thought.” Well done Chanos on shorting the stock.
Forward P/E ratio of various equity sectors/countries. All bar one have de-rated since the peak in Jan 2018 by 20-30%. Source: Fidelity via Isabelnet .
A great piece giving a nice perspective on machine learning and AI. First we had the AI platforms – AWS/Google/MSFT etc. Then this tool looked for a problem to solve – everywhere. Then a universe of companies solving problems with AI are born. Finally we have proliferation outside of tech.
Indian supreme court, after 10 years deliberation, hands a real shocker for Vodafone’s merged entity in the country (Vodafone Idea ). Essentially the court is forcing all companies to pay levies for spectrum on total revenue (not just telecoms revenue). Vodafone Idea are forced to pay $4bn. This is likely to put Vodafone Idea under (It has net debt of $14bn or 20x Net Debt/EBITDA). Hard to see in the share price chart but that last drop was 35%. Upstart Jio, which has been waging the mother of all price wars (it gave services away for free!), is unscathed by this ruling.
Gold is outpacing Copper year on year. This is generally seen as a negative sign. Source: MacroMavens .
Latest Investment Letter for Q3 from Third Point is out. It contains their view on activism and their edge in this strategy. They review of the successful Sotheby’s (BID) investment (acquired recently at a 61% premium). It also has an analysis of their new big holding in EssilorLuxottica (EL ) and why they like it (mostly the merger synergies).
Two academics have used digitised books and newspapers since 1820 to measure happiness based on word usage. They control for the change of meaning in some words (e.g. awful – used to mean ‘to inspire awe’). You can see clearly in the chart that war is bad for happiness. They also find that wealth does lead to an increase in happiness but it is dwarfed by the impact of increases in health. In fact, 1 year of longevity has the same effect as 4.3% of GDP Growth. Source: The Economist .
Chart of Global Government Bond yields. 25% have a negative yield … almost none yield more than 3%.
Snippet tries to give you useful tools . These include: A useful app to save articles to read later. How to check up on the health of the UK or US Economies. To see what stocks are being shorted . You can always find the Tools link in the sidebar. There will be plenty more to come.
SPOT have reported Q3 and there are lots of interesting points. The latest initiative, Podcasts, is seeing exponential growth (+39% Q/Q) They are also launching paid recommendations . On competition – “We continue to feel very good about our competitive position in the market. Relative to Apple, the publicly available data shows that we are adding roughly twice as many subscribers per month as they are. Additionally, we believe that our monthly engagement is roughly 2x as high and our churn is at half the rate. Elsewhere, our estimates imply that we continue to add more users on an absolute basis than Amazon. Our data also suggests that Amazon’s user base skews significantly more to ‘Ad-Supported’ than ‘Premium’, and that average engagement on our platform is approximately 3x. “
Updated opinion polls in light of events this evening. Source: Wikipedia .
Big profit warning from Nokia last week. They are seeing margin pressure from competition, and are having to make bigger investments into next generation mobile networks (5G). As a result they are also cutting the dividend. This competitor driven intensity ahead of a new investment cycle (5G) is very typical of the telecoms equipment industry. Their customers merging is not helping as they likely standardise on one supplier. They are also delaying 5G roll outs as a result.
We wrote about the hugely unusual decision by Biogen last week. There is a sleuthing Reuter’s piece that reveals what happened behind the scenes of how we went from a failed trial to a drug filing. The sell-side haven’t been convinced either. Many expect the FDA to demand another trial.
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