14 June 2020

Welcome back to the Week That Was series where I highlight a few things from the interwebs which I thought were interesting, noteworthy and probably worth your time.

Articles📝, Tweet(s)📱, Videos🎥, Charts 📈 all fair game with or without attendant commentary.

 

The history of magazine publishing in one photo.

Magazine Publishing @JohnColapinto

 

📊📉📈🙃 Maakehts

Expect the unexpected.

For some who bought Sasol shares in March at the low ZAR20s mark and have ridden an ostensible blue-chip ticker (with penny-stock behaviour atm) almost 10X to the upside in a quarter (it closed over ZAR180 at some point this week).

Possible 10X returns within a year without the stock ever approaching it’s all-time high is… pretty interesting. Yet, clearly there’s nothing to see here as the market regularly delivers jaw-dropping stories multiple times a day now.

E.g. The current market confidence appears purely based on (admittedly astounding & historic levels of) QE and a strong return in demand.

QE Moon? Source

A slightly more pointed take

Bezon S&P

The fact that $10,000 invested in Hertz the day after it filed for bankruptcy was at some point this week worth over $125,000 notwithstanding - the Nikola midweek valuation takes the cake.

In short:

The weirdness of course means, at least over the last quarter, the “Robinhood” retail brigade rode the wave while billions of Warren Buffet & Carl Icahn shaped dollars sat on the sidelines.

Retail v Gurus Source

 

🌌☀️💨🌏 Carrington Calling

As far as 2020 goes, we could definitely do with not ticking off Carrington Event 2.0 from the bingo card - as the year continues unfolding like a Black Mirror episode.

Kurzgezagt return to spooky titles in unpacking the mechanics behind these events.

 

🗽 Permanent Assumptions

I enjoy many of Morgan Housel’s blogs - hosted by Collaborative Fund where he is currently partner.

In this post he outlines what he calls 9 of his “permanent assumptions”, each of which he details with an additional few lines. I present the summary here:

  1. More people wake up every morning wanting to solve problems than wake up looking to cause harm.
  2. The world breaks about once a decade. There are so few exceptions it’s astounding.
  3. Stories are more powerful than statistics.
  4. Nothing too good or too bad stays that way forever.
  5. Knowing there will be a reversion to the mean does not mean you know when things will revert.
  6. Incentives are the strongest force in the world.
  7. A big group of people can get smarter and better informed over time. But they can’t, on average, become more patient, less greedy, or more level-headed during periods of upheaval.
  8. History is mostly the study of unprecedented events, ironically used as a map of the future.
  9. It’s easy to take advantage of people. It’s also easy to underestimate the power and influence of groups of people who have been taken advantage of for too long.

 

🦠🧼🖐💦⚕ Greenzone

 

Lockdown At Home

Fantastic graphic taken from Clive Thompson’s article on WFH.

@jw’s thread pedantically outlining being triggered by it is also pretty good

 

💉💊 Vaccine Search Update

Vaccine Tracker

Jonathan Corum and Carl Zimmer detail progress on current vaccine efforts on this oft-updated NYT page.

Seema Yasmin returns looking at three current vaccine approaches to covid19 and the people looking at them.

 

🎨 Summer in the city, Mason London, Digital, 2020

Lockdown Home Credit

 

🧠💬 Keep Learning

“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it! It’s rather like getting tenure.” ― Daniel Dennett

 

🌴🌲✈️🌳🌴 Oh…and one more thing

 

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