Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Tuesday

Latest Thiel class notes: "Picture a 2x2 matrix; on one axis you have underexplored vs. heavily explored. On the other you have consensus vs. contrarian. Biotech 2.0 would fall in the heavily explored, consensus quadrant, which, of course, is the worst quadrant. It is the new thing. The audience in Santa Clara last week was 100% bullish on it. AI, by contrast, falls in the underexplored, contrarian quadrant. People have been talking about AI for decades. It hasn’t happened yet. Many people have thus become quite pessimistic about it, and have shifted focus."

Could dotcom bubble 2.0 be over? Paul Graham Just Emailed Portfolio Companies Warning Of 'Bad Times' In Silicon Valley

Asset class correlations over time: "For active equity managers, periods when correlations are high and volatility is low are the 'danger zone,' while low correlation and high volatility provide the dispersion that allows good managers to outperform."

Primer on the water sector.

For a nice cash alternative, look at $SCMR. Trades well below net cash (negative enterprise value), free call option on wireless technology.

This is a great idea - "speed bankruptcy": "[T]he U.S. has implicitly turned the pre-existing debt of major banks into federally guaranteed debt, much like the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with obvious implications for moral hazard and misallocated resources."

Up and down the ladder of abstraction: "[T]he most powerful way to gain insight into a system is by moving between levels of abstraction. Many designers do this instinctively. But it's easy to get stuck on the ground, experiencing concrete systems with no higher-level view. It's also easy to get stuck in the clouds, working entirely with abstract equations or aggregate statistics. [...] This interactive essay presents the ladder of abstraction, a technique for thinking explicitly about these levels, so a designer can move among them consciously and confidently."

The Kelly Capital Growth Investment Criterion: Theory and Practice (World Scientific Handbook in Financial Economic) (World Scientific Handbook in Financial Economic Series)

Copper market primer

No comments: