The freelancing blueprint 🧵👇

The interview with CNBC of @chamath is a much watch because there is so much insight hidden underneath.

There are many things that caught my attention. The one thing was the abstraction that hedge fund strategies are all 'momentum' plays. What it seems to imply is that the marshaling of resources at an opportune time drives the future behavior of a stock.

From basic physics, we know that momentum is mass times velocity. So any 'momentum' tactic employs the variation of mass, velocity or both. Wrt stocks, mass is money and velocity is speed of trade.

We cannot argue that there are benefits of scale associated with having more money. Also, high-frequency trading has shown the value of high-speed trading. So in an abstract sense, market manipulation can involve a kind of momentum play.

The objective of stock trading is to buy a financial instrument at a low price and sell it at a higher price. The purpose of a momentum play is to front-run the decision process of other traders such that one acquires the assets before a decision is made.

An "Aquarium" needs cleaning in my opinion, but who am I, a mere monkey, to give advice?
Astonished at what @bellingcat discovered about GRU & FSB operations
Skripal https://t.co/PzH3a7JZvy
Navalny https://t.co/eZi63UhWw1
FSB https://t.co/sViYk9RwmB
GRU https://t.co/MY5d5gw2OG

A great post by Ilya Yahin on

Every time Putin talks about “our special services,” his signature smirk appears on his face, and in his words there is poorly concealed bragging
"Of course, we knew everything in advance"
"Yes, we are looking"
"Mercader has already been sent"
“World-class professionals”

Putin clearly loves all these spy games. He is very proud of the special services and therefore endlessly increases budget funding for them.
This is his top priority.
The elderly dictator cannot understand one thing:

there are no effective special services in a state that is completely corroded by corruption. You won't have honest professionals at your fingertips if your son-in-law buys shares of a state company for $ 100, the real value of which exceeds $ 380 million.

Big congrats to @nonfungibles on releasing their 2020 Annual Non-Fungible Tokens Report! @NathalieBcht, @latelier & I thoroughly enjoyed partnering with them on it: https://t.co/uNvX18GcQV.
Some key takeaways from the report & my personal observations a/t #NFTs. A long-ish 🧵👇:

MARKET SIZE: The NFT market had a historic 2020 - tripled in value, reaching $250m (in terms of value of all #Ethereum transactions on chain, so actual market size is even bigger). This is rapid growth for a space that’s just a few years old.

Market is still volatile & prone to speculation but more sophisticated use cases are emerging based on utility, community, competitive elements. All are prerequisites for a more mature market. For all the hype around crypto, it is #NFTs that offer some of the more promising uses.

USERS: # of users transacting NFTs is up. So is interest in NFTs more broadly - using Twitter activity as a proxy, the uptick in interest is clear & rose 5x in Nov 2017- Sept 2020 (similar trajectory for #DeFi btw). BUT it's important to remember this is still a niche ecosystem.

PROFIT: Some NFT #Traders are commanding profits in the 100s of thousands. Again, this is still a niche activity. There are high barriers to entry (incl. technological) for non-crypto enthusiasts + asset prices are going up very fast. It's still hard to price and value NFTs.

1. A company that has been brewing just outside our Top-5 for some time now is the electroporation (EP) company MaxCyte. Modelio assesses it as one of the best investments to capture the growing gene editing and gene therapy space, especially in allogeneic ex-vivo treatments.

2. We estimate that MaxCyte stands before a huge inflection point that will accelerate both growth and profitability. We have seen signs of the accelerating underlying activity by the fact that they in the last two years have added 9 of their 12 commercial agreements.

3. What makes MaxCyte unique compared to other “pick-and-shovel” businesses is their claim to milestones and royalties, something usually reserved for pharmaceutical companies.

4. As per the January update, MaxCyte has a potential pool of $950m in milestones, and a 2-3% (our estimates) of sales in royalties, that excludes licenses and consumables for the machines.

5. Reviewing the partners' pipelines, we think milestone revenues will unleash themselves in 2021 and beyond as they move further into clinical trials.