Snippet Recommends

Medical Conferences

  • One of the most useful tools in a healthcare investor’s arsenal is medical conferences.
  • Why? Key opinion leaders (KOLs) meet to discuss the latest data coming out from company-sponsored trials and research. Their views give an unrivaled and direct insight not just into the probability of success but also the commercial potential of various medical interventions.
  • One way to get a quick overview is summary quotes captured by the Stream blog like this summary of ACC ’23.
  • NB If you want to have free two-week trial access to the full database of transcripts click here.
Macroeconomics

Conversation on China

  • Conversation between Tyler Cowen and Yasheng Huang on China.
  • Wide ranging and in-depth, especially understanding the cultural, historic and sociological drivers that help understand China and turbulence ahead.
  • “One reason is the charisma power of individual leaders, Mao and Xiaoping … they could do whatever they wanted while being able to contain the spillover effects of their mistakes. The big uncertain issue now is whether Xi Jinping has that kind of charisma to contain future spillover effects of succession failure.”
  • “This is a remarkable statistic: Since 1976, there have been six leaders of the CCP. Of these six leaders, five of them were managed either by Mao or by Deng Xiaoping. Essentially, the vast majority of the successions were handled by these two giants who had oversized charisma, oversized prestige, and unshakeable political capital”.
  • Also a super interesting discussion on “why Chinese and Chinese Americans have done less well becoming top CEOs of American companies compared to Indians and Indian Americans”.
Stocks

Divine Semiconductors

  • If you haven’t come across it already, read and marvel at this article by a Wired journalist who took a tour of a TSMC semiconductor fab.
  • “Every six months, just one of TSMC’s 13 foundries—the redoubtable Fab 18 in Tainan—carves and etches a quintillion transistors for Apple. In the form of these miniature masterpieces, which sit atop microchips, the semiconductor industry churns out more objects in a year than have ever been produced in all the other factories in all the other industries in the history of the world.” (h/t The Diff)
Misc

Electricity Exergy Stagnation

  • “The most striking finding is that world electricity energy efficiency (measured as overall primary-to-useful exergy efficiency) has stalled, rising dramatically from 2% in 1900 to 15% in 1960, and remaining nearly stable for the last 50 years, only reaching 17% by 2017.”
  • Why? Power generation got very efficient from 1900 to 1960 but we started to use the electricity in uses that aren’t efficient (mainly switching use to heat and cool buildings).
  • Source.
Snippet Recommends Stocks

Nelson Peltz – Not Just an Activist

  • “If you look at Mr. Peltz’s track record, this guy used to drive trucks for his father’s food company. You might know that cold drink called Snapple. Nelson Peltz and his colleagues bought that brand after it had been run into the ground by Quaker Oats from $1 billion brand to 300 million brand. Mr. Peltz bought it around 98, 99. Within three years, they turned it around, made it a $1 billion brand again, and sold it off to Cadbury. These are folks who have real experience. They’re not just activist investors. They’ve done this. They have gotten their hands dirty.”
  • From the Stream Insights blog
  • If you want free access to their expert call transcripts for two weeks click here.
Misc

How does ChatGPT work?

  • In the spirit of Feynman this superb blog post, by none other than Stephen Wolfram, gives a lucid explanation of what is going on under the hood of the latest tech phenomenon.
  • The short answer is “it’s maths”.
  • “But in the end, the remarkable thing is that all these operations—individually as simple as they are—can somehow together manage to do such a good “human-like” job of generating text. It has to be emphasized again that (at least so far as we know) there’s no “ultimate theoretical reason” why anything like this should work. And in fact, as we’ll discuss, I think we have to view this as a—potentially surprising—scientific discovery: that somehow in a neural net like ChatGPT’s it’s possible to capture the essence of what human brains manage to do in generating language.”
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