Stocks

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

Stocks

Executive Departure

  • Interesting use of LLM to parse 8-Ks for unplanned executive departures.
  • “Executive departure stocks are those that experienced an unplanned departure of a senior executive over the previous month. The line shows the returns of these stocks relative to those of the investment universe, which consists of the top 1,000 U.S. stocks by market capitalization. The portfolios are rebalanced monthly and exclude transaction and financing costs. See important backtest disclosure below. From 12/31/2003 to 6/30/2024.“
  • Other AI-based analysis use cases in the source.
Stocks

Is AI hype or Does it Work?

  • A few links/stats on the topic.
  • Github co-pilot in this study led to substantial savings (30-50% time saved or reduced in some tasks).
  • Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast episode with the CIO of Goldman Sachs on the use of AI.
  • Good overview of current revenue run rate for gen AI products (chart).
  • A rather bullish tour of AI and semiconductors by Gavin Baker.
Stocks

Index Concentration Crisis

  • We all know indices are concentrated right now, more than ever. Just how bad is it?
  • “The startling conclusion is that, despite the Russell 1000 nominally providing exposure to its namesake number of stocks, the index affords an effective diversification of only 59 stocks.“
  • “Not only does market-cap weighting induce substantial single-stock risk, but the diversification provided by this foundational asset class has evaporated by 70% over the past decade.“
  • Equal weight, as the article argues, is not the solution here, as it “suffers from significant operational costs, underperformance, questionable assumptions, and skewed risk bets.“
Stocks

Average is not Median

  • “Antti Petajisto analyzed the return distribution of all US stocks in the CRSP database going back to 1926. Below is the distribution of returns for different investment horizons. Note that the distribution gets more and more skewed to the left as investment horizons increase and that the left-hand side of the distribution is not zero, but a total loss of investment (-100% return).“
  • Source.
Stocks

Shein and Temu – the tax loophole

  • Shipping goods with a value less than $800 in the US (150 EUR in Europe) is import duty free – something Chinese firms have been taking advantage of.
  • By some estimates these firms account for 30% of these de minimis shipments in the US. Most is by air freight.
  • This is all about to change in the EU. Will the US follow?
Stocks

Bridge RNA

  • This looks like a big deal – “The bridge RNA system is a fundamentally new mechanism for genome design,” said Dr. Patrick Hsu, senior author of the study and an Arc Institute Core Investigator and University of California, Berkeley Assistant Professor of Bioengineering. “Bridge recombination can universally modify genetic material through sequence-specific insertion, excision, inversion, and more, enabling a word processor for the living genome beyond CRISPR.“
  • Full Arc Institute blog here and AI simplified version here.
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