How to read well

  • Read mostly fiction. Why? “Careful descriptions and summaries miss too much of the world. Hard distinctions make bad philosophy“.
  • Read slowly.
  • Start many books, but complete only a few.
  • Buy on a whim – “If you create a home library it should act as one: It is there for you to discover and rediscover, to get lost in” – an anti-library.
  • And a few more ideas.

Scientific Revolutions

  • Fascinating chart showing how scientific revolutions progressed 1300-1850 between different countries.
  • Here, we leverage large datasets of individual biographies (N = 22,943) and present the first estimates of scientific production during the late medieval and early modern period (1300–1850). Our data reveal striking differences across countries, with England and the United Provinces being much more creative than other countries, suggesting that economic development has been key in generating the Scientific Revolution.
  • Source: Cambridge University.

Unusual Decline in Net Interest Payments

  • Despite the sharp rise in Fed Funds rate, company net interest payments have actually fallen.
  • We have concluded that a sizeable proportion of huge, fixed-rate borrowings during 2020/21 still survives on company balance sheets in variable rate deposits. Companies have effectively played the yield curve in reverse and become net beneficiaries of higher rates, adding 5% to profits over the last year instead of deducting 10%+ from profits as usual.” 
  • Source: Soc Gen (via themarketear).

The Laws of Trading

  • A book about trading isn’t ever actually about trading. It is either:
  • A former trader sharing stories from their glory days, e.g. Liar’s Poker, the exposé that morphed into a how-to guide, or
  • Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed.
  • So starts this engaging review of “The Laws of Trading” – a different take on the endeavour with broader lessons for decision-making in other domains.
  • The book’s author, Lebron, trained and worked as an engineer before switching to a career as a researcher and quant trader at Jane Street.

Collateral Damage

  • There has been a “seismic shift” in global financial markets – “the use of collateral, notably in the form of government securities” becoming “ubiquitous” at the cost of directly assessing borrower cash flow.
  • Pushed along by policy this switch from relationship to transactions banking has resulted in an unprecedented broadening and deepening of financial markets, especially derivatives.
  • Yet, this has also created huge vulnerabilities in financial markets, according to a new BIS article.

Podcast Business and Spotify

  • Podcast advertising leads to pretty good returns for brands.
  • After conducting a study with 250 advertisers and marketers, it says two-thirds (67%) of podcast ad buyers say that every $1 spent on podcasts returns between $4 and $6 for their brands.
  • Yet SPOT is struggling to capture this – why?
  • This blog post covers a lot of reasons. For example:
  • “[What’s] most misunderstood about Spotify is Spotify doesn’t get to monetize all the podcast content that they have. So in the most recent quarterly earnings report, they say that they had 5 million podcasts on their platform, but 99.9% of those podcasts, Spotify does not get to monetize.
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