jfan

META, ICE and FNV The banking industry looks quite cheap with all this chatter about recession risk even if earnings decline. Am I missing something here?

thanks for this paper. I read this a while ago but got more out of it second, third time around

The one yellow flag for me with them is the discordance between they willingness to pay down their debt after an acquisition despite speaking about it publicly. The second yellow flag is it seems that there is a transition process occurring with Jeff out of the CEO role over the past year with him bring his top managers into the spotlight.

Daniel Kahneman, who many are familiar with. Pioneered the concept of System 1 and System 2, along with risk aversion bias, base rates, etc. Gerd Gigerenzer, is quoted less in general media, but a really big academic in the world of heuristics and decision-making in wicked environments. Gary Klein has done alot of qualitative research on naturalistic decision making by experts and intuition. He has also done work on guided learning via case scenarios. He also has a structured way of conducting pre-mortems in groups. Phil Tetlock and his superforecasting book. (Fermi method, starting with base rates, adjusting priors, successful group forecasting) Garrett Hardin's Filters against Folly is classic. Shane Parrish has a whole collection of writing on decision making, utility of journaling, and has a course on decision making. Alot of focus by the above is on the cognitive aspects of decision-making. Less is focused on the affective side. I haven't found alot of good sources but Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir is really good on understanding how environmental and social stresses can affect cognitive bandwidth. Robert Cialdini's Pre-suasion book is also great as well. Hope this helps.

Sorry could be a bit clearer. Just trying to draw historical lessons from the demise of MySpace and to see if there are parallels with the Meta story.

I joined you in this toilet flushing moment. Not that I'm fantastic at pinpointing intrinsic value. But it seems to me the market has already priced in a digital ad market share decline from mid 20% to mid teens, and a terminal value PE multiple compression to 16 over the next decade. I just see WhatsApp monetization and Reality Labs as a free option at these market values. I guess the biggest risk is an exponential deterioration of social networks when people churn off to competitors. What were the reasons for MySpace's demise?

Has anyone used openbb.co?

@wonderingThanks for posting this video. I quite enjoyed it. Tope is very articulate and seems like an intelligent and shrewd operator. Africa does seem to have many opportunities and the paucity of institutional funds is definitely advantageous for Helios, being a first mover with permanent capital. It was insightful to learn that the opportunities like cellular towers are similar but different in an African context. Similarly, how bank profitability is very different due to the large mobile penetration but high # of unbanked individuals. I think it is very hard to say when Africa will attract institutional interest again. I think this microcap special situation/start-up will require a 10+ year investing time frame with very uncertain IRRs but the probability of a zero with Tope in charge is much reduced. PS - I am down a lot too

A couple quick primer resource on the history of the Vancouver Stock Exchange scam https://scamcouver.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/scam-capital.pdf https://www.vancouverpolicemuseum.ca/post/the-vancouver-stock-exchange-a-legacy-of-fraud-and-money-laundering-part-i https://www.vancouverpolicemuseum.ca/post/the-vancouver-stock-exchange-a-legacy-of-fraud-and-money-laundering-part-ii Reading this reminds me of the current crypto ICO headlines.

Thanks @Spekulatius. Will check out his resources. Wrt Blockchain, if you eliminate the central exchange, the regular trader would still need a communication interface with the ledger. I assume this would be the function of wallets in this case. My question is then, how do we trust the wallet provider to provide us the info that we needed and guarantee it's authenticity ( given that most of us have no coding skill). And how will these wallet providers have a profitable business model and goes will regulations affect them? I assume these wallets will not need some minimum amount of liquidity given that the Blockchain ledger is publicly transparent? And this statement is true, disrupts the centralized stock exchanges?

I'm looking to learn more about stock exchanges and their evolution. Does anybody have some recommendation, resources, blog links to build a foundation? Thanks

No, I didn't get that sense. He didn't come across judgmental. He tried to explain each country's rationale for making the moves they did. Reasons spanned from geopolitical ambitions, unresolved social conflicts, economic wealth creation, and energy security.

Highly recommend Daniel Yergin's recent book "The New Map". Too much material to summarize here but very comprehensive work on the nexus of geopolitics/security/economics with current and future forms of energy. He discusses the interplay between the 2 and how they shape each other. He gives me an impression of a balanced view of all sides. The big take home message is that oil is not going away yet (and unlikely to do so) and the transition will take many decades with lots of challenges. Interestingly, Canada only gets a passing mention about how the oil sands are competitive wrt to GHG emissions in North America and globally. Doesn't appear that Canada has much volatile geopolitics that shape the world or the oil/gas industry to write about. ** listened to the audiobook. Tried reading his book, The Prize, years ago, just too dense for my simpleton brain.

No

I understand that the methodology to calculate LCOE is highly tweekable and the outputs from various agencies can also vary. I came across EROI or EROEI as a concept as well for energy sources. It seems that depending on the organization publishing this data, the "value" of various energy sources can vary dramatically. Just wondering if anyone can give a primer on the difference between the two and what in your opinion is closer to the "truth"?

@Spekulatius I would agree that price volatility could get oil back to $50 at some point over the next 10 years. The question for me is will oil structurally fluctuate at a higher level than prior cycles? After listening to one of the recent Odds Lots podcasts, it seems that there is significant paucity of individuals interested in this industry and the replacement of tacit knowledge will be challenged. They speak of no students applied to a major Canadian university's petroleum engineering program due to lack of interest. Furthermore, they also speak of many of the existing talent pools retiring in the near term due to age and better oil markets affording an exit. This lack of talent may cap the supply response to demand over a longer time frame than the past. People are still apprehensive in believing that oil companies can sustain profitability and afford to provide well-paying jobs with employment security into the future. I can imagine this will gradually slow down project development velocity (unless technology can reduce the number of engineers needed). There seems to be industry consolidation now which I'm sure is to acquire people as well as property. With fewer players, couped with the EV, ESG, end of oil narrative and resulting financing hesitancy seems be leading to more rational industry behavior. I recall that finance went through a similar cycle in the 70s and early 80s with no one ever wanting to go into this field due to poor job prospects. Over past 3-4 decades, finance has now become the place to be. I wonder if this is an indicator of things to come. With that said, does anybody have any hard data in this? Finally, I am sure that Buffett's big Occidental bet is a based on his assessment that oil prices will remain elevated for longer than prior cycles. His historical oil track record is not stellar, but I don't think his prior bets were ever this big. Given how much value he places on certainty, I wonder if this may be a valuable data point to adjust your prior base case probabilities.

https://en.macromicro.me/collections/34/us-stock-relative/24033/wilshire5000-to-us-m2 This is the sp500 to m2 money supply (using this as a gauge of inflation). Not sure how valid this is.

A Decent overview on the oil markets with Josh Young

What is the downside of having multiple competing currencies within a single nation especially if tied to a basket of commodities?

I've attached a very recent report on the vulnerabilities of Blockchain especially as it relates to Bitcoin and Ethereum. Alot of it is quite technical and my grasp is a bit limited. However some salient points to consider. @Spekulatius keep these movies coming... 62af6c641a672b3329b9a480_Unintended_Centralities_in_Distributed_Ledgers.pdf

That clip is hilarious. I was rolling over laughing and fell off my chair.

@Spekulatius Thanks for Taleb's paper. I did quite enjoy his Antifragile book but, maybe its me, but his writing style is really verbose and meanders quite a bit. He is quite biased and makes very little attempt to offer a balanced critique. He also doesn't provide much evidence or data in his paper. A few highlights and thoughts from his paper: 1) "Earnings-free assets with no residual value are problematic to value." - this assumes this is a fad and will fade with time as people move onto something else. 2) The bitcoin ledger requires constant maintenance costs unlike gold which are minimal. - I'm not sure this is true. My understanding is that the public ledger is an open-source database that require no maintenance costs and that the costs are associated with transactions. Running a node especially a bitcoin node (to store the ledger) requires nothing more than a raspberry pi computer that costs $300 to make. Gold has substantial verification, storage/security, and transport costs. 3) Absorbing threshold is an interesting physiologic concept and quite true with respect to human body. If the number of people interested in bitcoin falls to a small number (?? number), it still suggests that this community of individuals is still interested in Bitcoin as a currency/store of value/signalling virtue/etc. With 8 billion people in the world, if the Bitcoin community is very small and there are very few transactions on a public exchange, the value of the bitcoin is the marginal price that the last person is willing to pay for getting into this group. It could be argued that if the group is small, it would suggest that these are "true believers" and might have the religious fervor akin to a cult where their conviction is so high that price to get a membership in this situation could be very high. In that case, the absorbing threshold may not apply. 4) "The fundamental flaw and contradiction at the base of most cryptocurrencies is, as we saw, that the originators, miners, and maintainers of the system currently make their money from the inflation of their currencies rather than just from the volume of underlying transactions in them." - I think is a valid point. The transaction costs are currently 10-20% of the block reward. I don't have any data that suggests that the transaction fees (priced in USD or satoshis) are going up. In fact that transaction volumes seem to be going down over time. I wonder if this is related to the HODLING ethos that is being promoted. 5) Gold and Silver as inflation hedge commentary. I'm no expert. But here is a decent link to some charts are data on this subject. https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/beyond-cpi-gold-as-a-strategic-inflation-hedge. Trying to get through the Hayek paper, it is equally a difficult read with periods of lucidity about what makes good money. 6) Bitcoin as a payment system. I recall reading the original bitcoin whitepaper and it did espoused the purpose was a peer-to-peer electronic cash system to be used as online payments. To @SharperDingaan point, this likely will service large value transactions vs small value transactions with requirements in layer 2 technology (eg Lightning network) with final settlement on the layer 1 blockchain analogous to daily banking vs global settlement processes. Overall, imo, his paper falls a bit short for me. ,

May give you some insight

People may have already come across this already.

https://blogs.imf.org/2021/04/05/how-rising-interest-rates-could-affect-emerging-markets/ https://blogs.imf.org/2022/01/10/emerging-economies-must-prepare-for-fed-policy-tightening/ This is an interesting blog for those following emerging markets by the IMF.