Misc

Miscellaneous is often where the gems are.

Misc

Analysing Impact of Covid – Habits

  • One interesting approach to understanding if things will change is to look at scientific research.
  • In this paper – How are habits formed: modelling habit formation in the real world – researchers measured how long it took to form a habit.
  • They found that the median time was 66 days ranging from 15 – 254 days.
  • Exercise habits took longer to form.
  • The longer it took to form the stronger the habit was.
  • With lockdowns now lasting longer than 66 days real habit change is likely.
Misc

Games

  • A brilliant extract from a podcast with Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke quoted by Alex Danco in his newsletter (after joining the company).
  • “I’m a card-carrying member of the “video games are actually good” club. I’ve learned so many things in my life through video games … I tend to point out a few I think are extremely valuable. Factorio is one of those. It’s the one game that anyone at Shopify can expense. .. We’re building supply chains for our customers; logistics networks; and Factorio makes a game out of that kind of thinking.
  • The reason why I think video games are good is because of transfer learning. There’s a good book called The Talent Code that talks about this. There was a famous story about people analyzing why Brazilians became so much better at soccer than anyone else. And there were many reasons – it’s a system that’s reinforced by all these things – but people hadn’t found the key reinforcing mechanism that made this true. 
  • It turns out, in Brazil there was a culture of playing a pickup game, a version of soccer that was played in a much smaller space and with fewer players. And the players did all the things you need to be good at soccer, but they did them significantly more often, because there was more ball contact per person. Just because that’s a different game than soccer doesn’t mean people won’t learn soccer skills. They had way more ball contact than someone who went through the British system, by the time they entered the Premier league, for instance.  
  • But if I sit down for an evening of poker, I make these decisions every hand. And then you look at a game like Starcraft, which I think is very good, or Factorio, and in a very compressed, fun environment, follow a certain activity over and over and over again which otherwise comes around only rarely. And doing that will change your mind, and your brain, and help you be prepared for situations you could never predict.“
Misc

Danish Mink and Covid

  • Last week Denmark sounded the alarm on potentially dangerous developments related to SARS-CoV-2 virus.
  • The two worrying elements are (1) a mutation in the spike protein which could render the upcoming vaccines and antibody immunity of those already infected useless (2) a jump from animal (mink) to human.
  • This is a good summary and the press release from the Danish Serum Institute (use Google Translate) is also worth reading.
  • STAT news have a more sanguine take – arguing that there is nothing to suggest the mutated virus could have higher transmission rates or risks for humans and single mutations rarely are cause for alarm.
Misc

Analogy and Metaphor

  • “When teaching, an idea is often put forth and the students may not grasp it. It’s like sailing into the wind. So what do you do? You tack with an analogy. You move to the side so that in the end you will make progress towards a goal that can’t be reached directly. “
  • An awesome database of analogy and metaphor to improve your writing – Metamia.
Misc

Product Market Fit

  • “I came across this guy, Sean Ellis. Now, Sean ran growth in the early days at Dropbox, LogMeIn, and Eventbrite. He even coined the term “growth hacker.” Now Sean found a leading indicator of product to market fit, one that is benchmarked and predictive. Just ask your users this. How would you feel if you could no longer use the product? And measure the percent who answer, very disappointed. After benchmarking hundreds of startups, Sean found that the companies that struggle to grow always get less than 40% very disappointed. The companies that grow most easily almost always get more than 40%, very disappointed. In other words, if more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, you have initial product to market fit. Now, this metric turns out to be more objective than a feeling. It predicts success better than net promoter score, and it’s not only the best way to measure product to market fit”
  • Source.
Misc

Asset Light

  • Suddenly, “size,” “footprint” and “incumbency” came to be understood as an expensive legacy rather than a competitive advantage. Investors wanted companies that were smarter instead of larger, as reflected in the new patois of sell-side flipbooks which now marketed businesses as “agile,” “disruptive,” “nimble” and – especially – “asset light”.
  • Nice chart demonstrating this.
Misc

Active Concentrated Portfolios

  • A thought-provoking piece (first one in the link) arguing against concentrated equity portfolios – the orthodoxy of the day.
  • Concentrated portfolios are built on the idea of “analytical certainty” which lends itself easily to “overconfidence” and “overweighting hubris”
  • Institutions that hold several such concentrated portfolios, thereby diversifying, might find instead they suffer from other forms of correlation – in terms of stock size (large cap) and style (quality or growth).
  • They will also find that the higher fees charged by concentrated active portfolios add up and don’t average down.
  • Most interestingly concentration “underweights luck” – that term most fund managers have pushed deep into their subconscious.
Misc

Airline Industry

  • Really good long read from Guardian on the state of the airline industry.
  • What it takes to store planes at Schipol is fascinating:
  • Fuel tanks were emptied, although not entirely: “You still need some weight in the plane, for the bursting wind we get here in Amsterdam.” The blades of the engine fans were locked into place with straps, so that, on gusty days, they didn’t whirl around endlessly and wear their parts out.
  • Every seven days, someone would climb into the plane and run the engines for 15 minutes to keep them functional. The air conditioning was switched on to keep the humidity at bay. “And the tyres – well, it’s the same as a car. If you keep a car parked for more than a month, you get flat tires,” Dortmans said. So a tug pulled the plane forward and back every month, to keep the wheels and axles in shape.
  • Still, there were some surprises. In the absence of the roar of jets, birds began to appear around Schiphol again, and one day, a ground engineer told Dortmans that he’d found a bird starting to nest in a cavity in the auxiliary power unit. “I’m hearing all these birds and now I find this,” he told Dortmans. “It feels like I’m out in the woods.”
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