Stocks

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

Stocks

Spoken Word

  • Spoken word audio (think podcasts, audiobooks etc) is taking share of listening away from music.
  • 22m more people in the US are listening to spoken word than seven years ago.
  • The biggest growth driver has been podcasts – which represent 22% of spoken word, up from 8% in 2014.
  • Lots more stats in this NPR/Edison Research report.
Stocks

Fintech Lending

  • Interesting study by IMF on fintech’s experience during the Covid crisis.
  • The chart shows continued strong growth through 2020 by fintech lenders, outpacing traditional institutions.
  • But also a pronounced increase in non-performing assets, something traditional lenders did not see.
  • This work is based on data from 20 economies and is part of the IMF Global Financial Stability Report.
Stocks

Factors

  • Since its inception financial research has been on the hunt for factors that can consistently generate positive returns. Most famously Fama and French’s value factor.
  • This search has led to a what one author has termed the “factor zoo” – a proliferation of factors – a direct consequence of data mining.
  • There is also a replication crisis – that factors are not internally (i.e. the results can’t be replicated within the original sample) and externally (i.e. results can’t be replicated out of sample) valid.
  • This paper (summary here) is a rebuttal of these issue – it uses Bayesian updating from a prior that a factor’s usefulness is zero. Their work finds that no crisis exists.
  • One idea worth thinking about is that according to the authors the 153 factors explored actually cluster into 13 themes – “possessing a high degree of within-theme return correlation and economic concept similarity, and low across-theme correlation” (as seen in the chart).
  • h/t AQR Research.
Stocks

Disney World

  • Collection Disney World maps through the years.
  • “This enormous land parcel is also unique in that it’s a kind of self-governing municipality, with its own fire department and emergency services. The district—officially known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District—is governed by a five-person Board of Supervisors elected by the landowners in the district. As a result, high-level Disney employees essentially run the entire region encompassing WDW.“
  • The area is so vast that “The Magic Kingdom parking lot, for example, is actually larger than the theme park itself.”
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