Stocks

Interesting, and often contrarian, Snippets on individual companies and the stock market.

Stocks

Tech Salaries

  • Meet levels.fyi – they collect actual like for like data on salaries, benefits, levels etc. for the US tech industry.
  • They use this to help people negotiate salaries (how they monetise).
  • Levels recently published a report for 2021 that has some fascinating data (h/t The Diff).
  • The table attached shows entry level engineer salaries.
  • Lots of other interesting stats – comp has been rising (generally highest entry-level salaries are growing +3.4% annualised since 2019) and the Bay Area still wins (40% higher than LA for example).
Stocks

Sales Tactics

  • John Foley, founder of Peloton, was so determined that “one of his sales techniques was to have customers test out the bike; he’d give them headphones and turn up the volume so when they talked to him about how much they liked the product they’d end up shouting an endorsement to passersby.“
  • In the early days of Salesforce “when a competitor was holding an event at Cannes, they booked all the taxis in Nice for the night and had sales reps stationed in each one to pitch their product to people going to the competitor’s event” (h/t The Diff).
  • These remind me of an old Snippet on how some major consumer apps got their first 1,000 users – often in surprising ways.
Stocks

Japanese Equities

  • Fundamentals in Japan are improving.
  • Japanese companies bloated their balance sheets with low-yielding cash and unproductive assets. This has meant that companies delivered just 3% return on capital compared to 6% fo the developed world for the majority of the past four decades.
  • Returns look to be improving according to GMO, the change is structural and not cyclical, and the result of improving margins and not improvement in inefficient balance sheets.
Stocks

Spotify’s TikTok Problem

  • 63% of TikTok users (1bn worldwide) discover new music on TikTok before any other platform.
  • This is worrying for SPOT.
  • TikTok has already launched a competing service – Resso – in key emerging markets (Brazil, Indonesia and India).
  • iOS App download rank data for the recent 90-day period from App Annie (pictured, link) shows it still hasn’t hit Spotify’s dominance (it has only reached 2nd place in Music category in Indonesia, and lingers in 4th for the other two launch countries).
Stocks

Archegos

  • Credit Suisse, who suffered $5.5bn in losses in the Archegos debacle earlier in 2021, have published a full report of what happened by an external firm.
  • Nice read for those interested in the inner workings of the Prime Brokerage business.
  • If you aren’t familiar with it, this is a brilliant introduction and history (paywalled).

Stocks

Moderna

  • Two part investigative report into Moderna.
  • The first part looks at the company pre-Covid – “From 2016 right up until the emergence of COVID-19, Moderna could barely hold it together, as it was shedding key executives, top talent, and major investors at an alarming rate.”
  • The second part covers how the Covid crisis “bailed” the company out and the circumstances around this.
  • A very deep and in places troubling read.
Stocks

Nike Amazon Searches

  • This is a testament to the power of Amazon as the start of product searches, as well as the recognition of Nike’s brand.
  • Despite Nike stopping selling any products directly on Amazon, its search rank on Amazon has not changed.
  • From the always excellent Marketplaces Pulse – Market Places Year in Review 2021.
Stocks

Energy Intensive Investment

  • Nice chart comparing the level of investment by industry forecast for 2022E against its ten year average (Source: JPM).
  • Energy-intensive industries have seen a collapse in investment.
  • This sort of data is supportive of Einhorn’s thesis and the capital cycles idea popularised by Marathon Asset Management (here and here).
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