• We previously reported on this here.
• It appears Google have made it official by publishing a paper.
• NYT article is a more friendly read.

• Market Folly is a great site.
• They often have insightful investment conference write ups.
• At these conferences leading managers around the world pitch their ideas. Be critical though – they are obviously talking their own book.
• Here and here are the latest from Ira Sohn San Fransisco.
• Common sense disclaimer. Just because a hedge fund is buying a stock doesn’t mean you should. One never knows what offsetting hedges or positions they hold. Be smart, do your own work, use common sense and invest responsibly. 

• Mistakes are only useful if you remember and learn from them.
• This is a great example of learning from one’s mistakes.
• Bessemer have put together their anti-portfolio.
• It is a list of all the missed opportunities they had as VC Investors.
• A gem – “David Cownan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine.” Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”

• Biogen have just announced they will be going ahead and filing Aducanumab (their treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease).
• Shares are +40% as a result.
• This is extremely odd considering just in March the studies were discontinued due to futility (i.e. they didn’t show an effect).
• The company is saying new analysis of a larger dataset has led to, in communication with the FDA, the filing decision (NB. approval is uncertain still).
• There is a huge unmet need [100% of drugs have failed, the disease affects 5.8m people in America (50m worldwide) and costs $290bn per year in direct and care costs] so perhaps there was pressure for a win.

• Many investors are on the sidelines right now.
• It brings to mind this market timing game.
• Try see if you can beat the market by buying and selling (once each) in any given randomly selected 10-year period from 1978.
• A more sophisticated version, but with worse UI, covering 1950-2018 is found here. You can buy/sell several times and decide to use history or a random selection of daily historic returns (Monte-Carlo).

• More problems for Uber.
• First, if Uber is deemed a Transport provider in the UK it might owe 20% VAT on gross bookings (ca. £1bn historically) and going forward.
• This could also apply in the EU as well.
• Second, it seems one of Uber’s insurer panel has quit – not a great sign and likely will lead to rising costs.

• Great long read about Jeff Bezos and his plan.
• Worth reading – after all this is the man in charge of nearly 40% of US eCommerce as well as AWS (Amazon Web Services) – the infrastructure most start-ups run on.
• A gem – Bezos has given $42m of funding for a clock – The Clock of the Long Now – on his ranch that will tell time accurately for 10,000 years.

• GS have done something interesting.
• They have run an internal start-up competition – allowing winners to take a 2 year step away from their job to develop their ideas.
• Employees at the bank are likely being tempted by the start-up world so it is smart of GS to keep their talents in house.