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We’ve constantly been sharing a list of our recent reads in our weekly emails for The Good Investors.

Do subscribe for our weekly updates through the orange box in the blog (it’s on the side if you’re using a computer, and all the way at the bottom if you’re using mobile) – it’s free!

But since our readership-audience for The Good Investors is wider than our subscriber base, we think sharing the reading list regularly on the blog itself can benefit even more people. The articles we share touch on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.

Here are the articles for the week ending 08 November 2020:

1. A Twitter thread on Jon Boorman’s final words – Jon Boorman

1) I’ve become very stoical in recent years which has made this much easier to process. I’ve had an absolutely glorious life. I sometimes feel I’ve had two or three

6)It’s a deep privilege to be able to say goodbye to people.

Deep privilege.

Constant family.

Countless friends…

7) Knowing that you will die is fairly innocuous, of course we all will. But when you know you face death within weeks/months, your perspective changes. There’s elements of that we should have in our daily lives…

9) I know I will die. I just know what will kill me. And roughly when.

So buy that coffee.

Have that ice cream.

And be nice.

2. How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet – David Pierce

Citron learned to code because he wanted to make games, and after graduating set out to do just that. His first company started as a video game studio and even launched a game on the iPhone App Store’s first day in 2008. That petered out and eventually pivoted into a social network for gamers called OpenFeint, which Citron described as “essentially like Xbox Live for iPhones.” He sold that to the Japanese gaming giant Gree, then started another company, Hammer & Chisel, in 2012 “with the idea of building a new kind of gaming company, more around tablets and core multiplayer games.” It built a game called Fates Forever, an online multiplayer game that feels a lot like League of Legends. It also built voice and text chat into the game, so players could talk to each other while they played.

And then that extremely Silicon Valley thing happened: Citron and his team realized that the best thing about their game was the chat feature. (Not a great sign for the game, but you get the point.) This was circa 2014, when everyone was still using TeamSpeak or Skype and everyone still hated TeamSpeak or Skype. Citron and the Hammer & Chisel team knew they could do better and decided they wanted to try.

It was a painful transition. Hammer & Chisel shut down its game development team, laid off a third of the company, shifted a lot of people to new roles and spent about six months reorienting the company and its culture. It wasn’t obvious its new idea was going to work, either. “When we decided to go all in on Discord, we had maybe 10 users,” Citron said. There was one group playing League of Legends, one WoW guild and not much else. “We would show it to our friends, and they’d be like, ‘This is cool!’ and then they’d never use it.”

After talking to users and seeing the data, the team realized its problem: Discord was better than Skype, certainly, but it still wasn’t very good. Calls would fail; quality would waver. Why would people drop a tool they hated for another tool they’d learn to hate? The Discord team ended up completely rebuilding its voice technology three times in the first few months of the app’s life. Around the same time, it also launched a feature that let users moderate, ban and give roles and permissions to others in their server. That was when people who tested Discord started to immediately notice it was better. And tell their friends about it.

Discord now claims May 13, 2015, as its launch day, because that was the day strangers started really using the service. Someone posted about Discord in the Final Fantasy XIV subreddit, with a link to a Discord server where they could talk about a new expansion pack. Citron and his Discord co-founder, Stan Vishnevskiy, immediately jumped into the server, hopped into voice chat and started talking to anyone who showed up. The Redditors would go back, say “I just talked to the developers there, they’re pretty cool,” and send even more people to Discord. “That day,” Citron said, “we got a couple hundred registration[s]. That kind of kicked the snowball off the top of the mountain.”

3. I Have A Few Questions – Morgan Housel

Who has the right answers but I ignore because they’re not articulate?…

…Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation?

What do I desperately want to be true, so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not?…

…What looks unsustainable but is actually a new trend we haven’t accepted yet?

What has been true for decades that will stop working, but will drag along stubborn adherents because it had such a long track record of success?

Who do I think is smart but is actually full of it?

What do I ignore because it’s too painful to accept?

4. My Biggest Post-Election Market Questions – Ben Carlson

Does the stock market care about anything anymore? We are still in the midst of a global pandemic that is only getting worse, oil prices went negative in the spring and we just went through a contested presidential election.

And yet the S&P 500 is just 2% below all-time highs.

Yes, the stock market plunged nearly 35% during those tumultuous days of February and March but it still boggles the mind how much we’ve gone through this year and the stock market has given a collective shrug based on where we stand.

5. A Twitter thread on 100 lessons on investing – Anand Chokkavelu

1. Most of this list is dedicated to insight on stock picking, but know this: It’s darn hard to beat the market. 99% of people are best served steadily buying and holding low-cost index funds at the core of their portfolios — and I may be understating that 99% figure.

3. Being contrarian doesn’t mean just doing the opposite. The “contrarian” street-crosser gets run over by a truck.

12. Example No. 3: leveraged ETFs. Bastardized ETFs like the Direxion Daily Financial Bull 3X ($FAS) are another great way to lose money. Even if you guess right on direction, the mathematics of the daily reckoning mean these instruments are long-term losers.

30. Adding money to winners > Adding money to losers. This one’s hard. One way I try to remind myself: Every 10-bagger has to double first; Every total loss has to drop 50% first.

38. While price matters, it’s hard to overpay for a truly great growth company. Like in a marriage, the trick is to correctly identify one, build conviction by learning more quarter after quarter, and try to hold on through the inevitable tough times. (cont.)

57. Long-tail events (aka black swans), as explained in @nntaleb’s Incerto series, are by definition unpredictable. And brutal. Since life isn’t a Monte Carlo simulation, we should think hard about our true personal risk tolerances.

85. If you can learn quickly from your own mistakes, you’re ahead of the game. If you can learn quickly from others’ mistakes, you’ve won the game.

91. Downer alert: We like control, but we can’t control everything. Life and luck can (and will) trump investment plans. You can do everything right and still die penniless. All we can do is give ourselves a better chance to succeed.

100. Despite my best efforts to improve each day, I will repeatedly and thoroughly fail to heed these lessons. Let’s hope you’re better at No. 85 than I am.

6. Traffic fatality rates spiked during the pandemic – Joann Muller

There were fewer cars on the road last spring during the height of the pandemic, but traffic fatality rates increased 30% in the second quarter as evidence suggests drivers engaged in more risky behavior, federal officials say…

…Risky behavior, along with a potential reduction in law enforcement and safety messaging during the pandemic, could have contributed to increased fatality rates, NHTSA concluded.

7. The Wizard Of Apps: How Jeff Lawson Built Twilio Into The Mightiest Unicorn – Miguel Helft

About a year after Lawson and two friends founded Twilio in 2008, Lawson was invited to introduce it at a popular networking mixer called the SF New Tech Meetup. Rather than talk about an inherently difficult-to-explain technology, Lawson decided to let the Twilio software speak for itself. In front of a thousand people Lawson began telling his story while simultaneously coding a Twilio app—a simple conference line. In just a few minutes he opened an account and secured a phone number, and after writing a handful of lines of code that everyone in the room could understand, his conference line was up and running. Lawson then asked everyone to phone in, and just like that a mob of developers was on a giant conference call. Lawson then added some more code, and his app called everyone back to thank them for participating. As phones throughout the room began buzzing, the crowd went wild with enthusiasm. “He is the let-me-show-you-what-we-can-do type of exec,” says Byron Deeter, of Bessemer Venture Partners, an early backer who has become Twilio’s largest shareholder. “There’s no bravado and no ego, and that gives him a special charisma and authenticity.”

Lawson’s parlor trick did more than generate industry buzz. It epitomized a developer-centric business strategy that has fueled its growth. Twilio is exceedingly simple to use and charges no upfront fees, so programmers often use it to test an idea or product. Pretty soon that product scales and turns into a six- or seven-figure account that required no traditional sales process. “We onboard developers like consumers and let them spend like enterprises,” Lawson says. Like others that have embraced developer-driven marketing—Amazon for computing services, Stripe for payments, New Relic for analytics—Twilio benefits as companies increasingly turn to software for differentiation. “As that happens, and companies hire more developers, they come in with Twilio in their tool belt,” Lawson adds.

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Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life. We currently have a vested interest in Amazon.com and Twilio. Holdings are subject to change at any time.

We’ve constantly been sharing a list of our recent reads in our weekly emails for The Good Investors.

Do subscribe for our weekly updates through the orange box in the blog (it’s on the side if you’re using a computer, and all the way at the bottom if you’re using mobile) – it’s free!

But since our readership-audience for The Good Investors is wider than our subscriber base, we think sharing the reading list regularly on the blog itself can benefit even more people. The articles we share touch on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.

Here are the articles for the week ending 01 November 2020:

1. The Fine Line Between Persistence and Insanity in the Markets – Ben Carlson

So people’s ears perked up when Einhorn said this week in a letter to his investors, “we are now in the midst of an enormous tech bubble.”

The problem with this statement is Einhorn has been saying the same thing for more than 6 years now. This is from a CNBC story in April of 2014:

“Now there is a clear consensus that we are witnessing our second tech bubble in 15 years,” Greenlight Capital said in an investor letter Tuesday. “What is uncertain is how much further the bubble can expand, and what might pop it.”

The firm said there were several indications of the over-exuberance, including the rejection of conventional valuation methods; short sellers forced to cover their positions because of losses; and “huge” first-day stock appreciations after their initial public offerings.

“The current bubble is an echo of the previous tech bubble, but with fewer large capitalization stocks and much less public enthusiasm,” the letter said. The firm said it was shorting a group of undisclosed “high-flying momentum stocks.”…

…Am I being disciplined in my long-term approach or blind to the fact that the world has changed is the single most difficult question to answer as an investor because no one is right all the time. The truth is the answer to this question is always unknown.

Sometimes you have to look like an idiot for a while before your investment thesis pans out. On the other hand, there’s the old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result.

What if continuously betting against tech stocks in a big way proves to be the definition of insanity? These stocks would have to see a spectacular crash to fall back to levels last seen in 2016 or 2014. Stranger things have happened, I guess, but I wonder what would cause Einhorn to change his mind.

The problem with bubble-spotting is no matter what happens you assume you’re right. If prices fall then you nailed it and if prices rise it simply makes you think the bubble is still inflating. I don’t know if this is a bubble or not but the answer will likely look obvious with the benefit of hindsight either way.

2. Lots of Overnight Tragedies, No Overnight Miracles – Morgan Housel

Dwight Eisenhower ate a hamburger for dinner on September 24th, 1955. Later that evening he told his wife the onions gave him heartburn. Then he began to panic. The president had a massive heart attack. It easily could have killed him. If it had, Eisenhower would have joined more than 700,000 Americans who died of heart disease that year.

What’s happened since has been extraordinary. But few paid attention.

The age-adjusted death rate per capita from heart disease has declined more than 70% since the 1950s, according to the National Institute of Health.

So many Americans die of heart disease that cutting the fatality rate by 70% leads to a number of lives saved that is hard to comprehend.

Had the rate had not declined over the last 65 years – if we hadn’t become better at treating heart disease and the mortality rate plateaued since the 1950s – 25 million more Americans would have died from heart disease over the last 65 years than actually did.

25 million!

Even in a single year the improvement is incredible: more than half a million fewer Americans now die of heart disease each year than would have if we hadn’t made any improvements since the 1950s. Picture the population of Atlanta saved every year. Or a full football stadium saved every month

How is this not a bigger story?

Why are we not shouting in the streets about how incredible this is and building statues for cardiologists?

I’ll tell you why: because the improvement happened too slowly for anyone to notice.

3. A Columnist Makes Sense of Wall Street Like None Other (See Footnote) – Emily Flitter

Each weekday, Mr. Levine, 42, wakes up at 5 in the morning. He looks at what’s going on in the markets, scrolls through emails from readers and plugs into the chatter of early-to-work traders. Then he starts to write. Roughly 5,000 words later on a long-winded day, he files Money Stuff to his editor, and it’s sent to subscribers around noon. (His column is currently on a parental leave hiatus, and will return this winter.)

Mr. Levine’s favorite subjects include insider trading statutes, bond-market liquidity and the ubiquity of securities fraud, but his columns are never boring. They may be the only entertaining words a financial markets professional reads all day.

Often, a significant chunk of the newsletter is devoted to a legal battle between sophisticated counterparties, or a complex financial product. Mr. Levine deconstructs the topics in a way that is less like a conventional business column and more like he is providing an introductory course on the subject.

If Mr. Levine’s column requires the use of a technical term, it is typically accompanied by not just a definition but a full-throated explanation, with practical examples, of how it works. There are footnotes — lots of footnotes. The tone, though, is anything but pedantic. Mr. Levine writes about Wall Street in a way that makes its denizens feel as if he is writing for them. Yet he gives the same impression of personalization to readers who know little about finance. He once took a term that appeared in a lawsuit — a “cash-settled forward purchase agreement for Citigroup shares with downside protection in the form of a put option at the same price as the forward” — and gave it the acronym CSFPAFCSWDPITFOAPOATSPATF. He makes readers feel in on the savage joke that is late capitalism.

4. Look Who’s Really Chasing Hot Stocks Like Zoom – Jason Zweig

Among this year’s hottest stocks, few are favorites of individual investors, and index funds aren’t their main buyers. Who’s driving them up? Professional stock pickers—the very people pointing the finger at everyone else.

Let’s look at Zoom Video Communications Inc., ZM -5.88% the teleconferencing company whose stock is up more than 660% so far this year. Given the popularity of its service and the stock’s scorching performance, you might expect Zoom is a darling among individual investors and traders.

Yet, on the Robinhood app used by millions of individual traders, Zoom was only the 49th widest-owned stock this week, according to the online broker’s tally of most-popular holdings.

In fact, of the 25 stocks with market values above $10 billion that have the hottest returns so far this year, only two— Moderna Inc. and Peloton Interactive Inc. —are among the 25 most-popular stocks on Robinhood. They are up 278% and 362%, respectively, in 2020.

The biggest performance chasers? Big institutions, whose ownership of scalding-hot stocks has boomed this year, even as these shares become wildly expensive by traditional yardsticks.

Some of that is natural; as a company’s market value grows, it becomes eligible for ownership at funds that can’t hold small stocks. Then again, professional investors, just like many amateurs, can’t resist a hot stock.

5. A Corporate Sleuth Claims Squarepoint Capital Took Her Content. The Hedge Fund Is Threatening Action. What Actually Happened? – Richard Teitelbaum

The news was potentially lethal. It was an inkling that Elbaze, a researcher at quantitative hedge fund Squarepoint Capital, might have been seeking improper access to Footnoted.com, the financial website Leder had started 14 years before and had turned into a thriving news and research service.

Elbaze had asked Leder a year earlier for, first, a trial subscription, and then a flat rate for full historical access to reports.

She had refused. Experience had shown her that Footnoted data is fiendishly difficult for quants to format. Firms like Two Sigma Investments, Point72 Asset Management’s Cubist Systematic Strategies, and AQR Capital Management had queried her about subscribing. Leder had even held informal talks with two funds to buy Footnoted outright so they could do the job themselves.

Reluctantly, however, just weeks before the email, she had agreed to provide London-based Squarepoint a trial. Then Elbaze seemed to have ramped up his activity.

“I was just, ‘Holy shit, what’s going on here?’” Leder recalls asking herself at the time. She emailed her developer. “He seems to have downloaded my entire database,” she wrote. “If he did do this, it’s a big BIG problem.” 

In fact, Leder estimated that Elbaze had viewed more than 17,000 pages — some of which even paid subscribers couldn’t get a hold of. A forensic investigation commissioned by Leder backed up her assessment.

6. Failing to Plan: How Ayn Rand Destroyed Sears – Michal Rozworski and Leigh Phillips

Lampert, libertarian and fan of the laissez-faire egotism of Russian American novelist Ayn Rand, had made his way from working in warehouses as a teenager, via a spell with Goldman Sachs, to managing a $15 billion hedge fund by the age of 41. The wunderkind was hailed as the Steve Jobs of the investment world. In 2003, the fund he managed, ESL Investments, took over the bankrupt discount retail chain Kmart (launched the same year as Walmart). A year later, he parlayed this into a $12 billion buyout of a stagnating (but by no means troubled) Sears.

At first, the familiar strategy of merciless, life-destroying post-acquisition cost cutting and layoffs did manage to turn around the fortunes of the merged Kmart-Sears, now operating as Sears Holdings. But Lampert’s big wheeze went well beyond the usual corporate raider tales of asset stripping, consolidation and chopping-block use of operations as a vehicle to generate cash for investments elsewhere. Lampert intended to use Sears as a grand free market experiment to show that the invisible hand would outperform the central planning typical of any firm.

He radically restructured operations, splitting the company into thirty, and later forty, different units that were to compete against each other. Instead of cooperating, as in a normal firm, divisions such as apparel, tools, appliances, human resources, IT and branding were now in essence to operate as autonomous businesses, each with their own president, board of directors, chief marketing officer and statement of profit or loss. An eye-popping 2013 series of interviews by Bloomberg Businessweek investigative journalist Mina Kimes with some forty former executives described Lampert’s Randian calculus: “If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.”…

…And so if the apparel division wanted to use the services of IT or human resources, they had to sign contracts with them, or alternately to use outside contractors if it would improve the financial performance of the unit—regardless of whether it would improve the performance of the company as a whole. Kimes tells the story of how Sears’s widely trusted appliance brand, Kenmore, was divided between the appliance division and the branding division. The former had to pay fees to the latter for any transaction. But selling non-Sears-branded appliances was more profitable to the appliances division, so they began to offer more prominent in-store placement to rivals of Kenmore products, undermining overall profitability. Its in-house tool brand, Craftsman—so ubiquitous an American trademark that it plays a pivotal role in a Neal Stephenson science fiction bestseller, Seveneves, 5,000 years in the future—refused to pay extra royalties to the in-house battery brand DieHard, so they went with an external provider, again indifferent to what this meant for the company’s bottom line as a whole.

Executives would attach screen protectors to their laptops at meetings to prevent their colleagues from finding out what they were up to. Units would scrap over floor and shelf space for their products. Screaming matches between the chief marketing officers of the different divisions were common at meetings intended to agree on the content of the crucial weekly circular advertising specials. They would fight over key positioning, aiming to optimize their own unit’s profits, even at another unit’s expense, sometimes with grimly hilarious result. Kimes describes screwdrivers being advertised next to lingerie, and how the sporting goods division succeeded in getting the Doodle Bug mini-bike for young boys placed on the cover of the Mothers’ Day edition of the circular. As for different divisions swallowing lower profits, or losses, on discounted goods in order to attract customers for other items, forget about it. One executive quoted in the Bloomberg investigation described the situation as “dysfunctionality at the highest level.”

7. Shonda Rhimes Is Ready to “Own Her S***”: The Game-Changing Showrunner on Leaving ABC, “Culture Shock” at Netflix and Overcoming Her Fears – Lacey Rose

Shonda Rhimes was tired of the battles. She was producing some 70 hours of annual television in 256 territories; she was making tens of millions of dollars for herself and more than $2 billion for Disney, and still there were battles with ABC. They’d push, she’d push back. Over budget. Over content. Over an ad she and the stars of her series — Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder — made for then-presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

But by early 2017, her reps were back in discussions with the company about a new multiyear deal. They’d already made a hefty ask of her longtime home and were waiting as the TV group’s then leadership prolonged the process, with one briefly tenured ABC executive determined to drive down the price tag on their most valuable creator. Meanwhile, Rhimes was growing creatively restless. “I felt like I was dying,” she says now of the unforgiving pace and constraints of network TV. “Like I’d been pushing the same ball up the same hill in the exact same way for a really long time.”

She knew her breaking point would come, but what it would be she never could have predicted. As part of her ABC relationship, Rhimes had been given an all-inclusive pass to Disneyland — and without a partner, she’d negotiated a second for her nanny. But on this day, she needed one for her sister, too, as she’d be taking Rhimes’ teenage daughter while the nanny chaperoned her younger two. If the passes had been interchangeable, Rhimes would have been happy to give up hers — when would she have time to go to Disneyland anyway?

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Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life. We currently have a vested interest in Netflix and Zoom Video Communications. Holdings are subject to change at any time.

We’ve constantly been sharing a list of our recent reads in our weekly emails for The Good Investors.

Do subscribe for our weekly updates through the orange box in the blog (it’s on the side if you’re using a computer, and all the way at the bottom if you’re using mobile) – it’s free!

But since our readership-audience for The Good Investors is wider than our subscriber base, we think sharing the reading list regularly on the blog itself can benefit even more people. The articles we share touch on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.

Here are the articles for the week ending 25 October 2020:

1. Early Work – Paul Graham

Making new things is itself a new thing for us as a species. It has always happened, but till the last few centuries it happened so slowly as to be invisible to individual humans. And since we didn’t need customs for dealing with new ideas, we didn’t develop any.

We just don’t have enough experience with early versions of ambitious projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them as we would judge more finished work, or less ambitious projects. We don’t realize they’re a special case.

Or at least, most of us don’t. One reason I’m confident we can do better is that it’s already starting to happen. There are already a few places that are living in the future in this respect. Silicon Valley is one of them: an unknown person working on a strange-sounding idea won’t automatically be dismissed the way they would back home. In Silicon Valley, people have learned how dangerous that is.

The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won’t work to trying to think of ways it could. That’s what I do when I meet people with new ideas. I’ve become quite good at it, but I’ve had a lot of practice. Being a partner at Y Combinator means being practically immersed in strange-sounding ideas proposed by unknown people. Every six months you get thousands of new ones thrown at you and have to sort through them, knowing that in a world with a power-law distribution of outcomes, it will be painfully obvious if you miss the needle in this haystack. Optimism becomes urgent.

But I’m hopeful that, with time, this kind of optimism can become widespread enough that it becomes a social custom, not just a trick used by a few specialists. It is after all an extremely lucrative trick, and those tend to spread quickly.

2. String of Firms That Imploded Have Something in Common: Ernst & Young Audited Them – Patricia Kowsmann, Mark Maurer, and Jing Yang

While it wasn’t possible to pinpoint why EY has had so many recent audit clients with financial scandals, certain elements of EY’s business strategy might help explain the cluster of blowups.

EY had ties with executives and board members at some of its troubled audit clients. In some cases, former EY partners sat on the companies’ boards, including on their audit committees.

EY charges lower fees for audits, which are labor intensive and time consuming, than other Big Four firms in the U.S. and Europe on average, an analysis of data from research firm Audit Analytics shows.

EY also focuses more than other firms on auditing young, fast-growing technology companies. All of the recent troubled clients portrayed themselves as tech-driven industry disrupters. EY helped some prepare for IPOs.

3. Models, Good and Bad – Marcelo P. Lima

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, gave an interview recently in which he noted that in the early days, Amazon would use a net present value (NPV) analysis for deciding which internal projects they should invest in. This is similar to the discounted cash flow (DCF) models we use internally at Heller House to evaluate investment opportunities and conceptually similar to the internal rate of return (IRR) calculation Adam Fisher made in his Wix memo: the goal is to figure out what types of returns one can earn from a dollar invested in a given opportunity.

When I’m asked about how we value the companies in which we invest—some of which don’t yet produce accounting profits—my answer is always the same: we use DCFs for everything. I know that my models are wrong because I cannot forecast a company’s revenue growth, profits, and margins ten years out. But it’s useful to have guardrails to Fermi-ize our assumptions: do they make sense? Is the outcome of the exercise reasonable based on what I believe is the market size of this opportunity? Is it within a realm of possible futures?

What Jassy and Bezos realized eventually, however, is that some of the most exciting projects they dreamt up weren’t getting funded. It was hard—if not impossible—to assign an NPV to them (in this regard, Adam Fisher did a very good job: it was hard to see the future for Wix, but he took a very good stab at it!).

Amazon ditched the NPV approach and moved to a decision-making process involving five questions:

• If we build it and it’s successful, can it be really big and move the needle?
• Is it being well-served today
• Do we have some kind of differentiated approach to it?
• Do we have some competence in the area, and if not, can we acquire it quickly?
• If we like the answers to the four questions above, can we put a group of single-threaded, focused people on this initiative?

4. 50 Cognitive Biases in the Modern World – Marcus Lu

Fundamental Attribution Error – We judge others on their personality or fundamental character, but we judge ourselves on the situation. [Eg:] Sally is late to class; she’s lazy. You’re late to class; it was a bad morning.

Dunning-Kruger Effect – The less you know, the more confident you are. The more you know, the less confident you are. [Eg:] Francis confidently assures the group that there’s no kelp in ice cream. They do not work in the dairy industry.

Declinism – We tend to romanticize the past and view the future negatively, believing that societies/institutions are by and large in decline. [Eg:] “In my day, kids had more respect!”

Framing Effect – We often draw different conclusions from the same information depending on how it’s presented. [Eg:] Alice hears that her favourite candidate is “killing it” with a 45% approval rating. Sally hears that the candidate is “disappointing the country” with a 45% rating. They have wildly different interpretations of the same statistic.

5. Client Case Study: When You Give Up Being A DIY Investor – Kyith Ng

Adam and his wife, Sabrina, have spent the past 13 years of their lives in successful individual careers as a Technology Engineer in an American MNC and as an Account Manager, respectively. Both realize that their money has built up over the years and do not wish to take the traditional route of wealth building that their parents took. However, being careful with their money, they tried to sift through the vast amount of information to find what is the right way to invest.

When tasked to invest his family’s wealth, Adam believed that a certain criterion was important to building wealth in a fundamentally sound manner. Eventually, they identified that a sound way to build wealth would be to channel their money from work and what they have into Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) that track certain regional indexes. Through his research, he understands the concept of having exposure to a portfolio of equities around the world. He also understands the importance of keeping their transactional costs low because costs would compound over time. That is how they started venturing out of safe fixed deposits and lower risk instruments and into higher risk and potentially higher return financial assets.

If you were to ask us to name a fundamentally sound way to invest in a do-it-yourself manner, we would tell you what Sabrina and Adam did was sound. We could even give you the blueprint on how to do it here:

• Identify a brokerage or fund platform that has low transaction charges or low platform fees
• Put the lump-sum you wish to invest, into a low-cost, broadly diversified unit trust or exchange traded fund. You can create a low-cost, broadly diversified portfolio with 1 to 4 funds depending on your preference and sophistication
• Contribute a portion of your cash flow from work into the fund
• On an annual or half-yearly basis, do a rebalancing if you hold more than 1 fund
• In terms of investment setup, that is it
• You should continue to get educated in this way of investing- focusing on a continuous education on market returns, on volatility and how the markets performed at various pivotal junctures
• With such an approach, you can then live a good life, because the investments are rather passive in nature. By not taking a too active approach to wealth building, this frees up your mind to do your best work in your career. The better you do in your career, the greater excess cash flows you will get from work to be channeled back into your wealth portfolio

Given Adam and Sabrina’s initial investible wealth of $600,000, a 30% savings rate which allows them to put away an initial amount of $100,000 a year, a higher than average salary growth of 7% a year, and a projected portfolio compounded return of 5% a year, Sabrina and Adam could grow their wealth to $9,674,623 in 18 years’ time when they are 50 years old.

Adam and Sabrina would have come across materials like the above in their research and they would have implemented something similar.

However, eventually a couple like Adam and Sabrina decided to approach us. Here are some of the challenges that they faced.

6. How Airbnb Pulled Back From the Brink – Preetika Rana and Maureen Farrell

Mr. Chesky quickly switched Airbnb’s strategy. Big cities visited by tourists had been Airbnb’s strength, but it would now focus on local stays. By June, the company had redesigned its website and app so its algorithm would show prospective travelers everything from cabins to lavish beach houses near where they lived.

On July 8, guests booked stays at the rate they were just before the pandemic brought travel and tourism to a halt. In August, more than half of bookings made were for stays within 300 miles of the guest’s location, according to the company.

It was a lucky break, and Airbnb was in position to capitalize on it. The CEO made more changes, including cutting marketing, putting many noncore projects on hold and laying off a quarter of the staff.

“I did not know that I would make 10 years’ worth of decisions in 10 weeks,” Mr. Chesky said in an interview.

The upswing has put the home-sharing giant on a path to go public and report a third-quarter profit this year, according to investors, something that seemed all but impossible months ago.

7. Accountable to Darwin vs. Accountable to Newton – Morgan Housel

Growing a population has rarely been a problem in human history. Virtually every nation could count on a consistent flow of births exceeding deaths. Population growth fueled economies and seemed like a law of nature. But Newton isn’t involved. Darwin runs the show. Things changed, living conditions improved, competition favored something new, and over the last 30 years births have fallen so much that most big nations will have fewer workers in 2050 than in 2020.

For decades, the dividend yield on a company’s stock was usually higher than the interest rate on its bonds. It made sense to people: stocks were riskier than bonds, and you must be paid extra in return. It seemed like an iron law of finance, blessed by Newton. But things changed. Around the 1950s, companies began withholding more profits to finance growth in lieu of dividends. Dividend yields fell below bond yields. Some people thought it was a sign of madness that must revert. But it didn’t. Today we think it’s normal because bonds have no growth upside, so you should be paid more to make the investment worthwhile. That now seems like a Newtonian law of finance. But in both cases investors are just being accountable to Darwin.

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Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life. We currently have a vested interest in Amazon and Wix. Holdings are subject to change at any time.

We’ve constantly been sharing a list of our recent reads in our weekly emails for The Good Investors.

Do subscribe for our weekly updates through the orange box in the blog (it’s on the side if you’re using a computer, and all the way at the bottom if you’re using mobile) – it’s free!

But since our readership-audience for The Good Investors is wider than our subscriber base, we think sharing the reading list regularly on the blog itself can benefit even more people. The articles we share touch on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.

Here are the articles for the week ending 18 October 2020:

1. China’s National Digital Currency DCEP / CBDC Overview – Michael @ Box Mining

China’s national digital currency DCEP (Digital Currency Electronic Payment, DC/EP) will be built with Blockchain and Cryptographic technology. This revolutionary cryptocurrency could become the world’s first Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) as it is issued by state bank People’s Bank of China (PBoC). The goal and objectives of the currency are to increase the circulation of the RMB and international reach – with eventual hopes that the RMB will a global currency like the US Dollar. China has recently established an initiative to push forward Blockchain adoption, with the goal of beating competitors like Facebook Libra – a currency that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claims will become the next big FinTech innovation. China has made explicit that Facebook Libra poses a threat to the sovereignty of China, insisting that digital currencies should only be issued by governments and central banks. DCEP is not listed on cryptocurrency exchanges and will not be for speculation of value.

2. Meet Amazon.com’s first employee: Shel Kaphan – John Cook

“I mean, nobody at the beginning had any clue how big Amazon could become,” recalls Kaphan, now 58. “Nobody. Certainly not Jeff. I have spreadsheets of his projections from when he was trying to hire me. And I don’t remember the specific numbers, but it was a lot, lot smaller than it turned out to be.”…

…So, you are kind of the forgotten founder? Most people think of Jeff Bezos as the creator of the company. “In fact, to be completely technically true about it, he is the founder. But I was talking to him about joining him on the venture before the company was incorporated. He basically was just arriving from the East Coast and setting up his house when I moved up from California. All that existed of Amazon was on paper at that point. Jeff was working on it full-time already, and his wife, Mackenzie, was writing checks every once in a while. But that was it. I didn’t get founder’s stock. It didn’t seem worth the argument at the time, although I kind of felt like, well, you know, I mean I was there at the beginning. And it was all going to work out the same way, one way or the other, regardless of the technicalities. And it just didn’t seem like something that I wanted to make a big deal about at the time.”…

…What was that era like just before you joined Amazon in 1994? “The previous job I had was with Kaleida Labs, which was an Apple-IBM joint venture that called itself a startup but really wasn’t. I left that in the Spring of 1994.  I lived in Santa Cruz, California, and that was at the time when there was a huge amount of ferment in the air with Netscape hiring up all of the hot-shot programmers around…. There wasn’t really much else going on at that time, but there was quite a bit of buzz about the Web, so my friend and I were thinking that we should do something about this, it is a big opportunity. I had been working in computers since the mid-70s and had sort of seen the first wave of the PC revolution come, and I didn’t jump on that. At the time, I was more enamored of what we then thought of as bigger machines, the kind of machines that the universities had. I was interested in the type of software that could run on those. I watched as the first PC wave happened and got bigger and bigger and bigger, and at some point I realized: ‘Oh, I kind of missed getting on that wave.’ So, I always had in the back of mind, if I see something that I want to be participate in coming, next time, I am going to act on it. A lot of time went by before I had that feeling again.’…

3. In April 2014, GDP in Nigeria Jumped 89%. How the Hell Did That Happen? – Morten Jerven

Yemi Kale, the director of the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics took the podium, and announced that the Bureau had revised their GDP figures. The base year for the national accounts was updated, and the new figures showed that Nigerian GDP was 89 percent higher than previously estimated. Given the relative size of the Nigerian economy for the region, this was quite a revision. That afternoon, Sub Saharan African GDP increased almost 30 percent. Economic activity equivalent to 58 times the size of the Malawian economy was added to the Nigerian economy…

…The advantage of coming at the problem of economic statistics as an Economic Historian is that one is keenly aware that the statistics are not given, they are made. That means that statistics are social and political products. In mainstream economic debates the biggest part of the discussion is focused on what drives inflation, and why employment is up or down. Meanwhile less attention is given to the very basic problem that while we know what employment and inflation are in theory, it is technically impossible to measure it cleanly.

The notion that we scientists can let the data or the evidence speak for itself is misleading. Skilled journalists, historians and lawyers interrogate witnesses and sources to figure who made the observation, and the biases behind what they observed. And in our own way,, economists and finance writers have to interrogate these soft numbers that we too often treat as hard facts.

4. Would Keynes Have Been Fired as a Money Manager Today? – Ben Carlson

Now back to the question of whether or not Keynes would have been fired by investors today if he showed similar performance, volatility and drawdown numbers. Unfortunately, I agree with the responses from Twitter in this instance, which is a shame. This is a legendary investment record during one of the most difficult periods in history to be an investor.

But short-termism and status quo are so widely practiced in the institutionalized world of investing that it’s highly unlikely that investors would have the requisite patience to stick with someone like Keynes today. Investors would certainly chase performance after the string of good years, but very few would be able to earn the overall outperformance figures.

For most investors the goal shouldn’t necessarily be to beat the market, but to not beat themselves. And then there’s the question of actually discovering the next John Maynard Keynes. But putting all of that aside for the moment — there is an unbelievable amount of time, effort and money spent on the singular goal of beating the market. It’s the entire reason many fund managers exist. Yet the conundrum is that there are very few investors out there with the correct level of patience or discipline to see through the type of strategy that’s required to actually beat the market by a wide margin.

5. 11 Lessons From 11 Years of Investing in the Stock Market – Sudhan P

In August 2011, I saw the first major stock market decline since I started investing.

The fall was due to uncertainty in the US over its debt ceiling and the country’s first-ever credit downgrade by S&P. There was also a debt crisis in Europe. 

Out of fear that some of the paper gains in my portfolio will turn to losses, I decided to sell off some of my stocks. 

It was an emotionally-draining mistake as it made me check on the stock market and stock prices every day, afraid that I would miss on the rebound when it happens. 

What actually happened was that the stock market started rallying on optimism that the debt crisis will be solved eventually. And I was forced to buy back the shares at a higher price.

I learnt from this episode not to time the market as it’s a really tough job. No one can know for sure when to exit the market before a crash and when precisely to buy just before a market upturn.

Various studies have also shown that being out of the market and missing the best market days can significantly reduce long-term returns. So, it’s far better to stay the course.

6. Twitter thread on every US president’s comments on money – Anand Chokkavelu

6. John Quincy Adams

“My wants are many, and, if told, would muster many a score; and were each wish a mint of gold, I still would want for more.”

12. Zachary Taylor

“Economy I consider a virtue and should be practiced by all; there is certainly no way in which money can be laid out than in the education of children.”

13. Millard Fillmore

“It is a national disgrace that our Presidents, after having occupied the highest position in the country, should be cast adrift, and, perhaps, be compelled to keep a corner grocery for subsistence.”

20. James Garfield

“He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation.”

23. Benjamin Harrison

“I pity that man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth shall starve in the process.”

26. Theodore Roosevelt

“It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself.”

32. Franklin D. Roosevelt

“It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.”

33. Harry S. Truman

“It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.”

35. John F. Kennedy

See also inflation.

“There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.”

44. Barack Obama

“Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you’re flying high at first, but it won’t take long before you feel the impact.”

45. Donald Trump

“Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.”

Bonus: Joe Biden

“My father used to have an expression. He’d say, ‘Joey, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about your place in your community.'”

7. The 7 Things That Matter For Markets Going Forward – Ben Carlson

Fiscal stimulus. The debt-to-GDP for the United States is a sight to behold:

We were able to perform an experiment in government spending during a crisis in real-time and it has been a resounding success. Retail sales quickly rebounded. The unemployment rate fell. Personal savings rates went through the roof. People were able to repair their personal balance sheets.

And a depression was stopped in its tracks.

I have more questions than answers:

• Will we see this type of government spending during future recessions?
• How would that impact the business cycle?
• Will this change how business owners and investors view risk?
• Will investors and markets respond differently to future recessions?
• Was this year the first step towards a universal basic income?

Politicians have been promising their policies would lead to higher GDP growth for years. None of them have worked. Now they’ve finally found the lever to pull that can conjure growth out of thin air — government spending.

How could any sane politician not use that lever every chance they get going forward?…

…The Fed. In every alien horror movie there always comes a point when the people being hunted by said alien come to realize it’s somehow getting stronger and/or smarter.

The main character of the movie, who typically covered in sweat, mud or blood will say, “It’s evolving.”

The Fed is the alien in this example.

In 2008 the entire financial system was closer to the precipice of collapse than most people realize. Looking back on it now I’m guessing Fed officials regret not going bigger or moving faster.

Jerome Powell and company didn’t want to have that same regret this time around. The Fed met the pandemic with bazookas blazing. They poured trillions of dollars into the system to keep markets functioning, effectively taking the Great Depression scenario off the table.

Markets rebounded across the board in record time.

It’s going to be difficult for the Fed to retract its alien tentacles from the markets. And if investors come to expect the Fed to have their back during every downturn there cold be some misplaced expectations and risk-taking because of it.

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Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life. We currently have a vested interest in Amazon. Holdings are subject to change at any time.