Technology | Finance | Business
General Patton centralized command with himself. How would you compete with “Bandito?” “They’ve got us surrounded again, the poor bastards” — Creighton Abrams I find it odd that people who talk about decentralization often don’t know the pros and cons of it. That’s a shame, because they will almost certainly end up losing money investing in things they are uncertain about. As of this writing, the…
More often than not, Twitter ends up being a malapropos use of time given the noise to signal ratio. But every once in a while, a gem surfaces to the top. This post is the direct result of a pseudonymous personality on Twitter that put me onto an essay written by Benjamin Franklin in 1729. The essay was penned as The Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency ; the ideas it expounded had me thinking…
There is absolutely an irrational exuberance happening right now in the market for cryptocurrencies. As I write this, the market capitalization for tokens and cryptocurrencies (for simplicity, I refer to the terminology "token" to represent both types of digital currencies) is roughly $111 billion , which for scale, lies somewhere between the market caps of Starbucks ( $87 billion ) and McDonald's…
One of my favorite things to do in Manhattan is to walk the streets and take in the daily bustle of New Yorkers. We're an anxious and rambunctious folk relative to other city-dwellers, so it is an interesting thing for me to do and stop to watch the commotion in slow motion. The Subway Echo Chamber Every day, I take the subway to work from the Upper East Side to the office or client site. As I…
I am deeply jealous, albeit slightly confused, of people who read over fifty books a year. I try to read around fifteen, and even then, I have trouble remembering what I read a few months after the fact. This is normal, of course, as the act of remembering information is a proxy of instituting that information in your daily thinking. If you don't think about it, you forget it. That's why the…
If you know me in person or follow me on Twitter, you know that I'm a pretty voracious reader. Having been like this for quite a while now, I have developed an approach on how I interpret information. This includes both news and books; temporary and permanent knowledge. Twitter Despite years of stagnation, Twitter remains by far my favorite social network. It gives you a glimpse into the head of…
I’m really not a fan of the term ‘artificial intelligence’, or AI, for short. We tend to connote a negative meaning to the word artificial, implying that an artificial intelligence is unnatural, and possibly even evil. In fact, the term AI reminds me of another term — genetically modified organisms (GMOs) — which have also been the subject of vicious debates in recent years despite, well, science.…
As a teenager, I used to obsessively read SSD reviews on AnandTech back when the technology was still new, unknown, and prohibitively expensive . Having no formal electrical engineering degree, the reviews were hard to get through at first, but after a few years I kind of understood most of the concepts and the technology (since mostly forgotten). But the truth is, all of that nerdery wasn't…
Being precious of your time, I'll just say the idea upfront: the reason IPOs are historically poor investments is because the valuation is already at a peak prior to the IPO. The subject of this post is why that is the case. Before we reason this logic out together, let me be clear that this point holds only for VC-backed companies. There are plenty of great companies that never take VC money, IPO…
There are three ways to make money in the asset management space: Have a large amount of assets under management ( AUM ) and charge fairly modest fees (mutual funds) Have a relatively low amount of AUM and charge high fees (hedge funds, venture capital funds) Have a relatively low amount of AUM, charge low fees, and employee very few people (small mutual funds, hedge funds, and venture capital…
I've been writing this blog for over two years now, but I've been reading strings of characters that we call words which form sentences who are the content of books for much longer. From the many blogs I read, my favorite sort of posts are those that recommend good books. Very rarely do I get my book recommendations from Amazon, Goodreads, or some sort of popularity contest listicle. I much prefer…
When I first heard of Bitcoin and the blockchain, I was chary. I'm always skeptical of anything that calls itself "The Truth", and the ardent Bitcoin supporters weren't helping. Many technologies actually start like this. They seem absolutely absurd to the those who live in a world without them. To be fair, most technologies are crazy and unrealistic, but a select few advance far enough to change…
I'm not sure what Dropbox has been doing since I last wrote about them almost a year ago. There have been many recent headlines of Dropbox's lowering valuation - it has even been branded a dying unicorn , but that might be a bit extreme (as tech headlines tend to be). To me, the path Dropbox should be taking is so clear that I can begin selling vision pills for flustered founders. At the heart of…
Some companies are simple to analyze. Their business models are straightforward, customers are easy to identify, and products clearly distinguishable. To the deep chagrin of analysts, Amazon is not this type of company. Amazon went from having Sales of $511k in 1995 to $2.76b in 2000. Fast forward to 2014, Amazon's Sales were roughly $90b. I have no doubt Sales will continue to grow in the future,…
In the last fifty years, the worlds of accounting and finance changed dramatically, mostly due to two factors: regulation and technology. I’ll leave the regulation part of out of this discussion for a later time, but the technology aspect is fair game for us. In the old pre-computer days, the accounting and finance professions had to do everything by hand. To calculate the revenue of a company,…
Over the long-run, technology moves at a lightning pace. But at times, it can feel downright dilatory. If you asked me in 1998 if I would still be using paper textbooks in school, I would say there is no way. We’re about midway through 2015, and textbooks are still the norm (in university, at least). If you told me in 2005 that scrolling through an 800-page PDF would be slow on a relatively new…
How can you gauge how innovate a company truly is? Is there a metric that comprehensively measures the innovative capacity of a company? It’s a loaded question, I know. There are many ways analysts look at the innovation that comes from within a company using their spreadsheets as lorgnettes, but none of the metrics alone answer the question. You can look at cash flows from investing activities to…
The following is a parable which shows how a company can go from success to failure over the court of its life. It is a simplification of reality. Despite this, this story is still able to teach us a valuable lesson. Revenues are inflows of money. If you sell a bar of soap, you get money. That money is revenue. Expenses are outflows of money. The money it cost you to make that bar of soap is an…
The charts speak for themselves - another great quarter for Apple! View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize
People often mention the term well rounded to describe folks who are good at more than one thing. John is a biology wiz, but he also knows a lot about sports and plays basketball every week. John is also well educated in history, given his fascination with medieval Europe. We are all familiar with this term in regards to people, but I’ve been recently thinking how appropriate this term is for…