Unintended Effects – Obesity Drugs

  • Obesity drugs have now been clinically proven to reduce body weight by 15% or more in some people.
  • This could have profound second-order effects that are worth thinking about.
  • This Guardian article is a good start.
  • One such effect comes from the drugs themselves – anecdotally they seem to suppress addictive behaviours.
  • Another is a boon for minimally-invasive skin tightening devices (if you want to read full transcript two-week free trial here).
  • This interview with the scientists that originally investigated GLP-1 is also interesting to read – especially the point that repulsion to food might reduce these drugs’ long-term use.

Patient Capital with High Active Share

  • High active share – where portfolios differ markedly from the benchmark – does well (+2% pa outperformance) but only if holding periods are over two years.
  • So having high active share isn’t enough if the fund trades a lot.
  • Being patient isn’t enough – as those with low active share do worse.
  • Full paper here.

Understanding AI

  • Economics says change happens in the adjustment of prices and relative prices.
  • Thanks to GPT, every programmer has the potential to be 10x more productive than the baseline from just 2 years ago.”
  • This means:
  • (1) The data-software combined price is collapsing opening enormous “volume growth”.
  • (2) Within it the relative value of software vs. data, especially unique data sets, is changing in the benefit of the latter (Media companies?).
  • (3) New scarcity is arising – likely in hardware and energy.
  • Full article here.

Ship Sulphur Emissions and Unintended Consequences

  • From 1st of Jan 2020 ships had to reduce the amount of sulfur in shipping fuels from 3.5% to 0.5%.
  • Although intended to reduce pollution, all that sulfur was reflecting solar radiation from the surface of the ocean.
  • With it gone, the part of the ocean dominated by shipping lanes is starting to heat up.
  • Source.

Panama Canal

  • Unprecedented drought in the Panama Canal is forcing some ships to offload 40% of their cargo.
  • It takes 200m liters of water per ship, that is pumped from Gatun lake.
  • Last year we had drought issues in the Rhine.
  • The coming El Niño weather pattern could lead to more issues for global transport supply chains.
  • Chart source: Tema ETFs.

Tesla and Service

  • Interesting analysis of Tesla’s purported business model compared to other automotive manufacturers – make cars that don’t break vs. the razor/razor blade (i.e. zero margin cars with high margin service and parts) typically adopted by others.
  • Tesla does not have an existing fleet and that the auto industry, the reason incumbents succeed and newcomers fail, the biggest reason is that the incumbents have a large fleet, and they’re able to sell new cars at close to 0 margin and then sell spare parts at a very high margin, sort of razors and blades type thing.
  • NB to access all the transcripts you can try Stream for free for two weeks.
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