A thought-provoking piece (first one in the link) arguing against concentrated equity portfolios – the orthodoxy of the day.
Concentrated portfolios are built on the idea of “analytical certainty” which lends itself easily to “overconfidence” and “overweighting hubris”
Institutions that hold several such concentrated portfolios, thereby diversifying, might find instead they suffer from other forms of correlation – in terms of stock size (large cap) and style (quality or growth).
They will also find that the higher fees charged by concentrated active portfolios add up and don’t average down.
Most interestingly concentration “underweights luck” – that term most fund managers have pushed deep into their subconscious.
40% of new (straight) relationships in the USA started online.
Due to Covid this is likely higher today than in 2017 where the data ends.
“The intensity with which singles are swiping and chatting is visible across all Match Group dating apps, which include Tinder, OKCupid, Match.com, Hinge and Plenty of Fish. Amarnath Thombre, the chief executive of Match Group Americas, said that messages were up 30 to 40 percent on most of the company’s apps compared with the same time last year.”
Interesting long read on the quest to chemically redesign sugar.
In 1880 the average American would have lived and died never having encountered a single manufactured candy. Today the average American ingests more than nineteen teaspoons added sugar every day.
Despite a turn in public opinion against sugar, alternatives don’t work – “none of sugar’s artificial replacements offer anything close to the same range of functionality. Sucrose reduces ice-crystal formation in ice cream; it adds crispness to baked goods, volume to dough, and a mouth-filling viscosity to drinks; it improves emulsion stability in dressings, reduces grittiness in chocolate, and even increases shelf life.”
Survey shows that Americans have devoted 35% of time savings from not commuting to their primary job and 60% to work activities of all sorts (incl chores and child care).
The World Bank is forecasting that more than 90% of the world’s economies were in a recession – the most broad based contraction of the past 150 years.
Remarkable chart. Sourced from a nice presentation on China.
“A great meeting has three key elements: the desired outcome of the meeting is clear ahead of time; the various options are clear, ideally ahead of time; and the roles of the participants are clear at the time.“
“I think that’s the single largest source of optimization for a company: the makeup of their meetings. To be clear, it’s not about fewer meetings because meetings serve a purpose. Rather, it’s key to improve the meetings, themselves. A lot of my efforts focus on teaching people this framework. Ironically, I find that most people are just challenged by that stuff.“
Really good long read from Guardian on the state of the airline industry.
What it takes to store planes at Schipol is fascinating:
Fuel tanks were emptied, although not entirely: “You still need some weight in the plane, for the bursting wind we get here in Amsterdam.” The blades of the engine fans were locked into place with straps, so that, on gusty days, they didn’t whirl around endlessly and wear their parts out.
Every seven days, someone would climb into the plane and run the engines for 15 minutes to keep them functional. The air conditioning was switched on to keep the humidity at bay. “And the tyres – well, it’s the same as a car. If you keep a car parked for more than a month, you get flat tires,” Dortmans said. So a tug pulled the plane forward and back every month, to keep the wheels and axles in shape.
Still, there were some surprises. In the absence of the roar of jets, birds began to appear around Schiphol again, and one day, a ground engineer told Dortmans that he’d found a bird starting to nest in a cavity in the auxiliary power unit. “I’m hearing all these birds and now I find this,” he told Dortmans. “It feels like I’m out in the woods.”
Current ESG scores are contradictory as seen in the chart showing correlation across providers.
This point, rarely raised about ESG, argues that markets adjust to price things in – “If there is an investing lesson embedded here, it is the unsurprising one that investors who hope to benefit from ESG cannot do so by investing mechanically in companies that already identified as good (or bad), but have to adopt a more dynamic strategy built around either aspects of corporate social responsibility that are not easily measured and captured in scores, or from getting ahead of the market in recognizing aspects of corporate behavior that will hurt the company in the long term.”
Very comprehensive post on the landscape of companies involved in financialising new asset classes or democratising access to existing ones and creating markets.
“Whether it’s the long tail of “alternative alternative” assets, venture-backed company shares, software contracts, or sport teams the financialization of everything is on its way.”
