- Good article on the possible future financial difficulties faced by UK Universities as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
- This chart shows that from 2006 to 2019 the number of Chinese students (paying full fees) in UK universities increased from 25k to 90k.
- Fees are by far the most important source of income.
- It is unclear what Covid-19 impact will be next year but as suggested it could just be short term liquidity issue for universities.
Misc
Miscellaneous is often where the gems are.
Making Mistakes
- Making mistakes in investing is normal.
- 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.‘”
Planting Trees
- Fascinating article arguing that planting trees is not all that good.
- Trees wreak ecological havoc especially in naturally treeless environments and the species planted is vital.
- They are also not panacea for climate change and in many cases treeless landscapes are actually better for the Earth.
Howard Marks Interview
- Interview with the investing legend Howard Marks.
- Always worth a listen.
- “No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.”
The Investor Game
- 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.”
How to get your first 1,000 users?
- This is an inspiring post on how some of the biggest consumer apps acquired their earliest users.
- Pinterest’s strategy was eye catching and shows real hustle – “We did all kinds of pretty desperate things, honestly. I used to walk by the Apple store on the way home. I’d go in and change all the computers to say Pinterest. Then just kind of stand in the back and be like, “Wow, this Pinterest thing, it’s really blowing up.”
- Snippet Finance – While we are on this topic, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our subscribers and hope you are enjoying the content. A lot of effort goes into curating and selecting only the most valuable snippets to inform and inspire. The best thing you can do to support the site is spread the word – each of you might have one person you know who could benefit, please do send them a link and tell them about it. Thank you in advance.
Venture capital & experience
- Experience matters in venture capital.
- Venture capital funds who were founded before the dot-com bust had a much lower variation in performance during the financial crisis of 2009.
- Worryingly, the majority (61%) of today’s crop of VCs have never seen a recession or economic trouble.
Commencement Address
- A really great commencement address (h/t Farnam Street)
- Part of a series commissioned by the Atlantic for students missing their’s due to the pandemic.
- It describes “the theory of maximum taste” … read for yourself to discover what that is.
- On the topic of commencement addresses, this is a brilliant one from J.K. Rowling given to the Harvard class of 2008. A must see.
Autographs
- Really fun blog post where a blogger went through Companies House to find autographs of famous people signing corporate documents.
- Here is Sean Connery.
- For more check out the link.
Commodity ETFs
- This is a great article explaining why you should be very careful when investing in commodity ETFs.
- For a more in-depth analysis of the most recent action in USO specifically worth reading the last few articles in FT Alphaville’s ETF series.
- Always use common sense when investing money – read the fine print.
68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
- Really fantastic list of 68 bits of advice.
- Some choice quotes.
- “Rule of 3 in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and once more. The third time’s answer is close to the truth.”
- “Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.”
- h/t The Browser.
Biotech Venture Capital Investing
- Despite the pandemic venture capital (VC) investing in biotech has been very strong.
- In fact Q1 2020 saw the single highest quarter ever (since records).
- It was also the highest average funding size per round at $32m.
- Biotech VC activity tends to be a-cyclical when compared to other technology VC.
- Under the surface the number of new biotech “first financings” continues to go down after peaking in Q1 2019. A worrying trend.
Innovation Lockdown
- One of consequences of the lockdown, as Ben Evans writes, is that it is a forced experiment.
- Many things are forced to change and it creates lots of opportunities especially in the way people work together.
- “tens of thousands of software engineers are cooped up at home getting frustrated with their current tools and wondering if they can spot some pain point, or mechanic, or small difference to the flow, and solve some opportunity that no-one ever quite realised was there.”
- Success can happen even if things look entrenched. The anecdote about Dropbox is telling – everyone told Drew Houston ‘there are dozens of these already’ and he kept replying ‘yes, but which ones do you use?’
- There are already some interesting new ideas in the chat app market.
Infectious Disease
- A really interesting chart.
- It shows that the majority of the improvement in mortality since the 1900 in the United States has come from improvements in infectious disease mortality.
- Source.
Lockdown
- A really excellent post from FT Alphaville trying to understand the lockdown.
- They point to analysis by Sir David Spiegelhalter, former president of the Royal Statistical Society and co-chair of the Society’s Covid-19 task force.
- He produced the pictured chart.
- “The pattern shows Covid deaths increase exponentially with age … this follows the pattern of normal risk. Whatever risks you’ve got, this just seems to exaggerate them — pump them up and pack a year’s worth of risk into a few weeks. Covid deaths are a fixed proportion of the people dying . ..”
- Two extra points added to this are those exposed to excessive viral loads (healthcare workers) and the 10s of thousands of unnecessary deaths from less emergency care.
- Moving away from the numbers – the moral discussion at the end is the most interesting part.
Covid Vaccine
- A really brilliant article on the state of Covid vaccine development.
- It gives a great overview and introduction into vaccines in general.
- There are 115 vaccines in development (78 currently active).
- There is a vast range of vaccine types (as the diagram shows). The article explains what all these types are.
- “We are only going to find out, in the end, by dosing people. Lots of people. With therapies targeting the immune system, there is in the end no other way to know, because of the complexities of the human immune response and its wide variation in the human population .. some of the steps are going to have to be done on a scale never before attempted … there are going to have to be some shortcuts.“
- There is one thing that can’t be skipped – how long immunity lasts. This question can only be answered with time.
- On safety – “Now you see the exact bind that vaccine development has always been in, because the whole point is to treat millions, even billions of people who are not currently sick, to protect them against disease while not doing more harm along the way by setting off the body’s fiercest and most alarming biological responses.“
- On manufacturing – “My guess is that scale-up and manufacturing could well be the biggest chance for the timelines mentioned earlier to blow up“.
- There is a willingness to pre-fund manufacturing, across all these varied types of technology, before efficacy is established by Bill Gates and others.
Start-up Ideas
- Interesting site posts one billion-dollar idea per day.
- Worth a quick look.
Stock Jump
- Friday fun.
- A ski jump game where you use real life stock charts. Enjoy.
Healthcare Resources pt 2
- Physicians per 1000 people.
Healthcare Resources
- Number of hospital beds per capita via OECD.
