Good Reads: Sensible Investing
First Quarter 2022 Investor Letter from Third Point. Here. Their biggest position is Shell, and they made an additional investment in ConsenSys. Dan Loeb on the changing market environment:
To be an investor is to live constantly at the intersection of story and uncertainty. We build our mental models, frameworks, and processes to try to accurately price securities and overlay them with a story about the economic, geopolitical, and psychological factors that frame the backdrop to value them. The key, of course, is to change your framework when the environment changes. Even the most sophisticated quant investors employing hundreds of PhD mathematicians and physicists find that their models can fall short due to the ever-changing topography of the surface area of relevant data.
Everyone is some kind of profitable. Here. The instant delivery startup Jokr says it is profitable if you count "fully gross profit positive on a group level for our local business across all of our countries after 12 months of operations.”
I'd look for more of this in the coming months as the market teases out which companies have fundamentally broken businesses models.
'Buy now, pay later' sends TikTok generation spiraling into debt. Here. Key stat:
In California alone, 91% of all consumer loans issued in 2020 — defined by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation as loans for “personal, family or household purposes” such as car, utility or medical loans — were buy now, pay later loans, also known as point-of-sale loans.
Jack Bogle Was a Punk. The new book The Bogle Effect shows just how radical Vanguard’s founder was—and that his true legacy is the company’s mutual ownership, not its beloved index funds. A great profile of Jack Bogle and Vanguard in Bloomberg is here. My view is that if web3 wants to get investment DAOs to match vision with reality, they will need leadership akin to that of Jack Bogle.
Perhaps the most astonishing fact about Vanguard is that, though it manages more than a quarter of the assets in the entire fund industry, it accounts for only 5% of the industry’s revenue. Bogle’s net worth was about $80 million when he died, a fraction of what his peers in finance had amassed. “In the history of Wall Street,” Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and The Big Short, told me, “the ratio of money touched to money taken was never so high.”
The Absurdity Supercycle - Being Early After the End of History. Here. A reflection from a trader and former Palantir employee on the current state of markets from meme stocks to crypto.
Shredding the endowment investment playbook with Scott Wilson, CIO of Washington University in St Louis. Podcast here. Good discussion of the changing investment landscape.
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