The problem: Investors’ voracious appetite for insights on a limited time budget.
The mission: Use my experience as an investor to curate the most interesting snippets of information and deliver them in a short easy to digest way.
I think I’d curate snippet even if no one read it, and use it as a sort of living notebook. However, I am so grateful for so many of you for subscribing and for all your feedback.
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We previously covered this brilliant list of 52 things learnt for 2018, 2019 and 2020.
Here is the 2021 edition – full of gems. A few choice examples:
“Social media headlines are evolving fast. Since 2017, they’ve got shorter (11 words vs 15 words), and many clickbait phrases like “…will make you…” or “things only … will understand” no longer work.” [BuzzSumo].
“Adding nature imagery (grass, trees, rainbows) to a pitch document seems to increase the likelihood of investment a little.”
“Baileys Irish Cream was invented in 45 minutes in 1973 by two ad creatives in Soho.“
COBOL is the programming language that underpins the entire financial system.
“Over 80% of in-person transactions at U.S. financial institutions use COBOL. Fully 95% of the time you swipe your bank card, there’s COBOL running somewhere in the background.“
“The second most valuable asset in the United States — after oil — is the 240 billion lines of COBOL”
The language is old (from the 1960s) and runs on huge machines (mainframes), yet it is extremely suited to the task of processing billions of transactions very fast.
Since its inception financial research has been on the hunt for factors that can consistently generate positive returns. Most famously Fama and French’s value factor.
This search has led to a what one author has termed the “factor zoo” – a proliferation of factors – a direct consequence of data mining.
There is also a replication crisis – that factors are not internally (i.e. the results can’t be replicated within the original sample) and externally (i.e. results can’t be replicated out of sample) valid.
This paper (summary here) is a rebuttal of these issue – it uses Bayesian updating from a prior that a factor’s usefulness is zero. Their work finds that no crisis exists.
One idea worth thinking about is that according to the authors the 153 factors explored actually cluster into 13 themes – “possessing a high degree of within-theme return correlation and economic concept similarity, and low across-theme correlation” (as seen in the chart).
“The number of asset managers and asset owners that are signatories to the Principles for Responsible Investment – thereby committing to incorporate environmental, social, and governance considerations into investment analysis and decision-making processes – more than doubled from about 1,400 in 2015 to more than 3,000 in 2020“
“In conversations with POLITICO, more than a dozen industry and government officials involved with the work of Gaia-X said the project was struggling to get off the ground amid infighting between corporate members, disagreement over its overall aims and a bloated bureaucratic structure that is delaying decisions. One industry official closely involved in the work of Gaia-X called it a “mess.”“
