Recent academic work has been finding that expert networks have idiosyncratic value for investors.
After analysing 15,000 transcripts they find that these calls give incremental information, especially on technology, product, and operational topics relevant to firms, and tend to be a good tool to understand complicated negative developments.
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Imagine if foundations/grants would only pay for projects that had already succeeded at making an impact, leaving “venture” to take the risk on which projects actually would succeed by buying shares in them.
This idea, reverse engineering how capital markets operate, is discussed at length here in a very practical way.
“Nationally, across all industries, hiring decreased 6.5% in February compared to January. This is the largest month-over-month decrease we’ve seen since April 2020, though we don’t expect declines of this magnitude to occur on a regular basis going forward. Year-over-year hiring decreased 27.9% – and hiring has now declined for 10 consecutive months“.
The argument that AI is unlikely to be a winner for the middle-ground companies.
Why? “was a feature not a product” – in other words value will either accrue to core AI platforms (e.g. Open AI) or to incumbent software tools with distribution who will just add AI features.
“Adobe will own the AI-based image editing market Office & Google Docs will own the AI-based writing market Salesforce will be the best AI-enabled CRM Shopify the best AI optimization and customer support Zoom the best AI meeting summaries … all with a few API calls“
900 days ago this site ran a series of article comparing challenger banks and incumbents in the UK on how good their user experience was (we covered it here).
Today, there is an update, and the picture hasn’t changed.
This chart for example shows the time between app updates – a measure of how quickly improvements are coming to customers.
“On average, the challenger banks deploy updates 4.6x more frequently than the incumbents“.
“Czech Republic has one of if not the best reputation in policy-making credibility. When they signal a cutting cycle is to begin, its worth taking note.“
Interesting interview throughout on all things EM and Macro.
“The most intriguing aspect of Wall Street’s behavior is that if we examine every period of industry decline over the past several decades, we see that stock prices reach their lowest point when the industry only starts to experience a fall in earnings, well before the trough of earnings. The stocks were already recovering and surging by the time layoffs and consolidation occurred.“
Semiconductor index (SOX) is up strongly since October lows and earnings cuts have only just started i.e. a typical pattern with the expected bottom of the cycle is Q2 2023.
Yet, as argued here, this cycle appears different – (1) days of inventory at record high which will take, despite a desire for supply chain resilience, more than two quarters to clear (2) there is an oversupply of certain process tech (3) channel stuffing has been a big feature.
A harsh, almost damning, write-up of Intel, pre-dating the dividend cut.
“In reality, Intel is not the giant of the industry. Intel’s total share of industry capacity is around 10%, they are not a giant who has stumbled, they are a niche player and have been for years.“
