1. Does the new trade deal deliver for the UK and the EU automotive sectors? I and other colleagues have been working tirelessly over Christmas to answer this question – thanks @mattogg @Mulk_Lloyd!!. Here are my thoughts - warning, very long 🧵ahead!

2. First, a necessary clarification. Comparing the UK-EU FTA with the status quo is simply futile. Even the most ambitious FTA cannot – and it is not intended to – deliver the benefits of the EU Single Market and Customs Union.

3. There is only so much an FTA can deliver. No FTA could avoid creating a customs border. No FTA could waive origin rules. No FTA could avoid new non-tariff barriers. It is no mystery that UK Automotive would have preferred other options precisely because an FTA has limits.

4. To compare apples with apples, a fairer question is not whether the FTA is better than the Single Market - it isn’t - but whether this is the most ambitious FTA we could get for the sector. And I hope the rest of the thread can shed some lights on this point.

5. Having a deal is, in itself, a major positive. The idea that having an FTA or not having one makes little difference could be true for some sectors. This is certainly not the case for Automotive. Without an FTA, tariffs would certainly apply.

According to S3 Partners, $TSLA shorts have lost $35B in 2020. I talk with many TSLA shorts, and have been on the other side of their trade all year. Here is where $TSLAQ got it wrong: Way under-estimating TSLA TAM, and in thinking ICE-branded EV launches would hurt TSLA.

2/ Street estimates are soaring. $TSLA 2020 and 2021 EPS ests have almost doubled this year, as Y has quickly become TSLA ‘s best selling model with less than 20% cannibaliz’n of M3. Model Y is now being taken global. Meanwhile, China volumes will be 50% of TSLA volume in 2021.

3/ When I argued with shorts about Model Y, they missed that Y was a small SUV and M3 was a small sedan. The two don’t compete. And yet, shorts would argue Y would massively cannibalize M3. Y more than doubled $TSLA ‘s US TAM, from 25% to 66%, and will do the same globally.

4/ From my $TSLAQ discussions, I gathered that few had taken the time to drive the various TSLA models, esp the new Y. None did focus groups with TSLA owners, or very few discussed TSLA with rival dealers, all which shocked me. Their research consisted mainly of current year...

5/ ...and backward-looking financials, and their best materials were charts comparing $TSLA mkt value to ICE mkt values - mindless since going forward TSLA’s competitors are AMZN, GOOG, AAPL, NIO, and RIVN. $TSLAQ would make fun of my forecasts to 2025, saying it was impossible.

A reminder of the Newsnight expose on The Tavistock.

Homophobia was a factor in the resignation of over forty staff over a three year period.

Girls openly telling staff they suffered homophobia in the family and at school.

Eventually they ended up identifying as trans.

Parents openly stated they would prefer a trans kid rather than a gay one subject to parental pressure? Director of GIDs pushing prescribing despite clinical concerns.

Few terminologies you should know before you buy any share.

A Thread 🧵👇

When you're buying your first share, you placed an order than your Demat account. There are many terms should be aware of :

1/ Order - It is a show of intent to buy or sell shares in a given price range.

For example, you may place an order to buy up to 100 shares of Company A, at a maximum price of ₹80 per share.

2/ Bid - Your bid is the amount that you are willing to pay for a share.

3/ Bid-ask spread - This is the difference between the amount people are willing to spend to buy a share and the amount at which the shareholders are willing to sell a share. A trade can only happen when this spread is resolved.

What is intangible asset? Why investors should focus on it?

1/ Well, everyone knows an Intangible asset is not physical in nature i.e., it is something that we cannot touch. Let explore more into the concept of intangible assets – a valuable driver for companies.

2/ Intangible assets include goodwill, brand value, patent, copyright, trademark, etc. It is important to evaluate these assets as they are a valuable contributor to a company for long-term success or failure. For instance, companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft

3/ are successful due to significant brand recognition. Similarly, Indian FMCG companies like HUL, Coalgate, Britannia enjoy huge benefits due to investment in brand awareness. IT and Pharmaceutical companies protect their sales through patents, copyright, software licensing.

4/ Most internally created intangible assets are not recorded on the company’s balance sheet or have no recorded book value. For instance, even though a coca-cola logo carries huge brand value, it does not show on the balance sheet because it was created internally, and

A thread on the Tasmota TLS MitM attack I found a few months ago since getting a proper blog post about it is taking me forever.

Tasmota is an open source firmware that runs on a number of ESP8266-based IoT home automation devices, which talks to an MQTT broker for management.

MQTT can be run over TLS to provide confidentiality and integrity, but given the constraints of running on an ESP8266 device, standard TLS certificate validation is rather heavy. As an alternative, Tasmota implements fingerprint based validation, like SSH

The fingerprint validation can do "trust on first use" (TOFU) and just remember the server's public key. This can work well if you're hosting your own MQTT server, and you can just use a self signed certificate. The fingerprint algorithm was even based on how SSH does it.

If you read RFC4253, it describes the RSA key format with the following encoding

string "ssh-rsa"
mpint e
mpint n

where e is the public exponent (usually 65537) and n is the modulus.

Slight problem. RFC4253 doesn't explain what an mpint is.

You have to go dig up RFC4251 for what an mpint is. The precise details don't really matter for this bug, but the critical detail is that an mpint is length-prefixed, which makes it unambiguous where when mpint ends and the next begins.

Tasmota's implementation missed this.

With a fixed supply of money, holding the money itself is similar to investing in a global index fund which offers no yield but appreciates with global productivity. Anyone can be an investor; zero fees, experience, or professional management required.

Anyone who earns money can expect to keep it and watch it appreciate, without needing to do any more work.

With easy money, you need to beat inflation to keep the value you earned & for that, you need several professionals working full-time trained for years and plenty of luck

Imagine if every child could expect any money they earn or get as a gift to appreciate over time without needing professional management. How much more would children grow up to value saving and low time preference?

Imagine if every professional could focus on their job and watch their savings accumulate & gain value without needing to have a side job trying to figure out what stocks, bonds, commodities, and other arcane instruments to buy & who to hire to manage them all?

Imagine if the old, retired, and widowed could just count on their savings maintaining value without having to follow & speculate on global macro trends & insane monetary policies.

Save The Economy, Not The Stock Market. https://t.co/Q1V0k04zVY business information

If you need a profession inside sales and advertising with an international perspective then get a High-up Bachelor’s diploma in International Gross sales and Marketing. It is a rare thing to attain AND preserve B2B gross sales and marketing alignment”,

Some thoughts on tick data for long to medium-timeframe trading

1/n

First, let's get the facts straight.
Other timeframe traders (investors) can be visible on micro timeframe data but micro timeframe traders(locals) cannot be visible on other timeframe data(>daily)

So obviously if you have the access then the logical choice is using micro-timeframe data (tick).
Theoretically sounds great but practically if you're hunting for a pattern that goes beyond days or weeks in tick data then it requires huge data to evaluate such patterns.

The workaround is to compress the tick data based on information gain rather than transforming the data based on a fixed timeframe like 1 m 15 minute and then do the evaluation.

Remember the timeframe is just for our convenience so we can read the market induced information. There is no magic timeframe and if it exists then it most likely a curve-fitted one. Ofc that's my own observation and not a ground truth

Threat 1/ 👇: One of the characteristics that differentiate good investors from bad investors is the ability to identify OPTIONALITY in companies and their discipline to either get it for free or pay very little.

2/ Think about it as buying out of the money options, if you pay too much for something that has very small odds of happening you lose money. This is what happened in the 2000's crash, people bought internet stocks based on illusions, very few of them had any real business.

3/ The markets assign "perceived" higher valuations to some businesses and lots of investors scream how expensive everything is. Some are, but a lot are not, and not being able to identify the optionality of some businesses can destroy your opportunity to have outsize returns

4/ Estimating the odds of something that does not exist or it is very small to succeed and grow is very hard. For something new to work it is needed: The technology, the infrastructure, and the distribution, then new ideas can come which use those, they'll have + odds of success.

4/ Optionality gets "cheaper" once you find the above characteristics as the odds of a company with a new idea/project are higher. The thing is that anything that will come from the new ideas/projects won't be reflected in the financials, but that is where the opportunity lies

Thread: Bull Case on $FSRV

$FSRV is a great investment due to strong balance sheet, incredible growth in both earnings and revenue, and serve a competitive niche within this fintech market. I am very excited to be apart of this, undervalued, long term investment opportunity:

What does Katapult do?

They’re a fintech lending, e-commerce focused, service that allows nonprime customers to borrow money and purchase durable goods such as: Fridge’s, Tables, Couches, etc

Why they are competitive?

Some consumers with little to no credit often times don’t get approved, and it can be costly. Katapult leverages AI and ML to allocate money to them CHEAPER and faster than ever before.

Has this been profitable?

They have both grown revenue AND EBITDA at astounding rates. They hit profitability this year and grew 171% YoY. They project they will have a CAGR of EBITDA and Net Income at 75% 🤯🤯

This is a profit and growth monster, an investors dream!

Can they maintain this growth?

Lending isn’t a new service, and neither is leveraging AI/ML. But Katapult’s customer segment is niche, as nobody else wants to do it. They stand in their own quadrant, providing a long runway for niche growth.

If you are in the top 10% of the income distribution,

and you are a Rightwing Free Market Libertarian

(you want *zero* government enforced wealth redistribution)

the probability you are motivated by real ideological conviction is low...

...the probability you are motivated by sheer self interest is high.

People are not trustworthy witnesses as to what their own motivations are.

If you ask a rich person who wants zero government enforced wealth redistribution (Socialism) why they want this, they are likely to give you Free Market Libertarian rhetoric about some 'Non-Agression Principle'.

The truth is much simpler; they care a lot more about their ability to NOT pay taxes, than they do about poor people's ability to access free stuff in the form of government services.

Support MSME

The Australia China trade war has resulted in China seeking support for import of of iron ore from Africa. Africa is building its iron or system which will take nearly the next five years to develop completely till then China is looking at India for its import.

This is a very crucial time for the Indian market to understand its own local and domestic needs and fulfill it before exporting the much-needed iron and steel raw materials to China.

This will in turn result in increasing prices of iron and iron materials in China and therefore India can capitalise this opportunity to export and products made of these important commodities at much higher prices.

The Indian Steel market has been under great pressure due to skyrocketing prices as the after effects of the covid-19 lockdown still persist increasing the ever growing gap between the huge demand and the shortening supply.

The manufacturers have not been receiving their pending payments due to which they are not able to procure enough raw material to make the products.

What does the Trade and Cooperation Agreement mean for the UKs #extradition arrangements with the EU27?

Lets take a quick look

Thread

A reminder of the respective positions of the UK and the EU in their negotiations that the UK Government considered a 'UK WIN'

As rightly said by @StevePeers, the reality is that the Agreement appears to be closer aligned to the EUs objectives, particularly given the EU wins in relation to dual criminality, ability to determine applicability for political offences and surrender for own nationals. EU WIN?

To begin with, as per previous arrangements, #extradition is referred to throughout as a 'mechanism of surrender'. Unlike the Council Framework Decision on the European Arrest Warrant, the surrender arrangement does not appear to be based on mutual trust and recognition

Despite the UK Governments negotiating position of not seeking participation in the EAW scheme, the Agreement provisions on surrender closely follows the wording of the Framework Decision on the European arrest warrant

@RaoulGMI 1/ Ari is mostly right. The @grayscale vehicles provide an amazing way to get exposure at a fraction of the publicly traded price of these vehicles.

Let's start with $LTC.

The $LTCN NAV is $9.97. This is where LP's get to purchase.
The stock is trading at $329.48

@Grayscale 2/ If you put $100,000 into the trust, you get back close to 10k shares of $LTCN.

So immediately your $100k is worth $3.3m approx. Not a bad deal.

BUT, you have to hold it for a year. (the risk)

BUT, how big is that risk? How low would $LTCN have to go to lose money.

@Grayscale 3/ You don't have to be a genius to understand that the price of $LTCN would have to drop by 97% or so in order for you to lose. Those are my kind of odds.

Keeping this in mind, if $LTCN went down by 80% in a year, and $LTCN was $65, you would STILL make over 600% on your money

@Grayscale 4/ I am not going to say this is truly a case where the rich can get richer, but it certainly favors the accredited investor in a huge way.

You can repeat this with $BCH ($BCHG), $XLM, $XRP, $BTC, $ETH, etc.

Now, history tells us that the premium decreases over time as LP's..

@Grayscale 5/ get liquidity. However, using $ETHE as a barometer, while premiums were high initially, they eventually normalized in the hundreds of % points and when the big liquidity push came and investors unlocked it came down around 40%. NOW, with interest revived, back to 200%.

1) The Ecosystem, Part 1:

Getting Dressed

2) NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE

and even more importantly, not clothing advice

3) This story ends with @bonfida, but it starts with @SushiSwap.

By now pretty much everyone knows the story:

The meteoric rise, the sudden crash, the dormant period, and the recovery.

This story starts at the lowest point: right after the migration.

4) See, the lowest point *should* have been right after nomigate.

But of course there was negative sentiment then! That was expected.

The brutal part for the project was after the fires were put out--the dev funds returned, the migration successful.

5) That should have been the recovery.

But instead, Sushiswap endured a month of the most negative sentiment I've ever seen a project have.

There was a chat, as the major builders and multisig holders got things off their chest.