Irresistible to leave this moment alone - a thread to share some investment lessons:

1/ Size matters.
Melvin entered 2021 circa $12 billion in AUM and runs a highly levered balance sheet. That’s a lot of short exposure to move around if needed.

2/ WSB/Reddit captured a market inefficiency.

Stocks are not supposed to have over 100% short interest. Naked short selling is illegal. This set-up should never happen. Kudos to those who took advantage.

How it happened and what it means has rampant ramifications, but in this moment the individuals captured the anomaly.

3/ Be careful dismissing “in theory” for those rare moments when it becomes “in practice.”

Keynes said “markets can be irrational longer than you can be solvent.” I suspect this won't take down any significant hedge fund, but it definitely hurts.

3b/ Be careful dismissing “in theory” for those rare moments when it becomes “in practice.”

Academic finance teaches that “a short sale has unlimited downside and limited upside. Those events almost never play out, until they do.

[QUICK THREAD: PERSPECTIVE]
1/11
Make no mistake, I abhor that prancing peacock, I really do. Just not for your reasons. His financial corruption doesn't bother me. His Islamophobia does, but only so much. His lies, again, only to an extent.

2/11
Financial corruption is as old as politics itself. Lying isn't a Modi-exclusive feature, it practically underscores Indian politics. And islamophobia? Ask yourself, is he the inventor of Islamophobia, or the product?

No, what bothers me is his mainstreaming of trash.

3/11
Men can set you on fire and livestream your death under far-from-tacit political patronage. That's what I hate Modi for.

It's a mundane reality that you'll receive threats of rape and death for merely pointing out his flaws. That's what I hate Modi for.

4/11
Academic institutions get addressed by conmen like Jaggi and Ramdev. That's what I hate Modi for.

Congregations of scientists talk about Vedic airplanes and radioactive dung with a straight face and it's elitist to call them out for it. That's what I hate Modi for.

5/11
A panwala in Bombay not only has a strong opinion on what's best for Kashmiris but also wants every one of them gunned down to uphold that opinion, even though nobody in his entire family tree has even a hint of stake in the state in question. That's what I hate Modi for.

1/16
Was reading upon #Biases & learnt a lot. Thought of sharing a few pointers .
Simply put Bias is a disproportionate weight in favour of or against any idea/thing in all aspects of life.
Few types of Biases ( out of the many) with not so random images. :)
+

2/16
The #DunningKruger effect now is fairly well known , wherein people with limited knowledge overestimate their competence, whilst the actually knowledgeable question themselves often .
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge".
+

3/16
*#SelfServingBias*
A very interesting bias wherein we credit our successes to purely ourselves, but when things go awry we cite luck & external forces .
Rings any bells?
Basically a defence mechanism to protect our self esteem & eventually from personal responsibility.

4/16
* #ConfirmationBias *
We all favour ideas & beliefs that affirm to our existing ones' , rarely being open to contradictory opinions .
(Especially in markets !! 😬) Why?

Laziness? Mental block? Ego ?
No wonder, Birds of a feather flock together ... 😉

5/16
* #SunkCostBias *
As we know, sunk costs are irrecoverable , regardless of outcomes. (Eg Money expended towards R&D for a molecule which doesn't work out)
But this actually extends in any investment we make - Time,Money, Effort, Relationships ...😏
Interesting right?

You see so many people on Twitter saying

"Infosys ADR is up 5% today."

"ICICI Bank and HDFC Bank ADR ended highly positive today. Good move coming up for Banknifty."

Have you ever wondered what is ADR? You're not alone.

Time for a thread. 👇👇👇

1/ Back in the early 1900s, people were buying shares in foreign countries in the respective country's exchanges (many still do).

There are few issues with that:

- Complexity of the purchase
- Currency conversion issues
- Difficulty in transactions

and so on.

2/ JP Morgan saw this, and thought

"what if people could trade foreign companies

- in our country
- in our currency
- but without the companies having to list themselves here?"

ADR was born.

3/ ADR stands for American Depository Receipts.

It's like a share certificate, issued by a U.S depository bank (like CDSL here), but on a foreign company.

Usually one ADR unit represents one share of the foreign company.

4/ Here's how it works.

The depository bank buys the foreign company shares in the foreign exchange.

This depository bank holds the purchased shares as inventory.

It issues respective ADR for domestic trading.

The ADR is issued & traded in US Dollars.

I find it very strange that the same sort of people who look back on the financial crisis and austerity as catalysts for great change now seem to see Brexit and Covid as catalysts for great stability.

Partisanship is one helluva drug. Financial crisis = bad crisis. Brexit = good crisis. Even Covid, unequivocally a bad crisis, is characterised in parts as a good crisis (world beating vaccine etc).

A different reading (which spans Labour, Coalition and Conservative governments) is that 2008-2021 has been one continuous period of crisis punctuated by shorter periods of calm.

Crises aren’t the exception. Scottish independence and the future status of NI look ahead. They are the rule. More specifically, whether the crises are endogenous or exogenous the state has proven woefully ineffective at dealing with them.

We are meant to try to learn from this. And do our best not to apply partisan blinkers. The problems are deeply rooted. And, very obviously, Brexit isn’t the fix. It’s an attempt at a cure but in the same way as a radical therapy that solves some problems but creates others.

1/ A thread [1/2]about your NHS pensions, tax & the age discrmination “McCloud” case👇

OK this is complicated stuff, Im going to take you through it step by step. But its important, and will affect your pension, so buckle up and pay attention!

Please share & RT/share awareness

2/ To understand “McCloud” let's rewind to yesteryear- you gave a lifetime of public service & (deservingly) got a good “final salary” pension.

Broadly in 1995 (or “legacy”) pension scheme, each year you got 1/80th of your “final salary” as a pension & 3/80th a tax free lump sum

3/ Back in yesteryear, pensions cost 5 or 6% gross salary. For example you worked 37 years & final salary £120k, pension= 37/80ths x £120k=£55,500. You would get this at normal retirement age- 60yrs & it would be index linked to inflation, plus a lump sum (3/80ths) of £166,500

4/ So roll on 2006-08 & government were worried about affordability of the scheme. Life expectancy was increasing so people were in retirement longer. So they made the scheme more expensive & introduced a new “2008” section for new entrants. The 08 scheme removed the lump sum

5/ Existing 95 members had a “choice” to move to ‘08’ scheme. It had a higher retirement age (65) but paid a higher “accrual rate” (60ths not 80ths). Rather than “final salary” (best of last 3 yrs) it was based on a more complicated “reckonable” pay based on best 3/10 yrs pay.

Weird feeling. After 10.5 years and roughly £21,000 of debt- I finally paid off the last instalment of my student loan today.

Next month, for the first time- I’ll receive my full post tax salary, for the first time since I graduated.

Sharing as an example of how the system works in practice. In truth I only seriously started paying off the capital in the last few years, when I started to earn a good salary, paying roughly £400 a month off. I suspect many will never significantly eat into the capital.

That’s especially the case for those those under the new regime, who have over £50k of debt. I was lucky in a) lower fees (3k not 9k) and maintenance grant (not loan) still existed.

Indeed IFS forecasts that 83% of students from PST 2012 reforms won’t fully pay back their loan.

Of course those who don’t pay off their fees, the cost will eventually have to be absorbed by the Treasury. Having 17% pay back all and the rest some will still be cheaper for HMT than no loans at all. But we should recognise the a) odd conceit that we have a system of loans...

...which the vast maj will never pay back and that instead b) that graduates are paying in effect a topped up rate of income tax for many, many years.

@MotilalOswalAMC annual Wealth creation study is live now. One of the most anticipated financial event in a year.

This year is the 25th Wealth Study and kudos to @Raamdeo for his consistent annual efforts to continue this activity.

This year's theme is coming up with a checklist of 25 questions (checklist) to identify bottom-up stock picking

Infosys in 25 years has compounded its profit from 13 cr in 1995 to 16450 cr

Time is a friend of Good Companies ! What a saying. Compounding delivers it magic over a period of time.

Next 10 years in FinTech.

The Fintech tsunami is happening, and there is no way back.

Long thread 🧵👇🏼

1) In 2030, the largest “bank” in the world will not-be-a-bank.🏦 Think- Square, Stripe, Affirm, AntFin, PayPal, etc. Many large asset categories are still untouched by Fintechs, and once that starts to happen, several new ~$100BN - $500BN 💰 companies will be created.

2) Major economies will have low or no-Cash 💵; primarily due to ‘digitization-of everything’, and CBDC. Major central banks will transition to a digital currency paradigm, where national currencies will compete on features (like software does) as well as economics.

3) Credit Bureaus will become redundant. The 'spending-to-income-habits' indicator will overtake credit score. In the new decade: How responsibly one spends the money will become a stronger indicator of creditworthiness than all bureau data scores.

4) Algorithms— built into MoneyOS — will automatically refinance debt to the lowest possible rate, triggering massive compression in profit pools for banks. These “Systems of Intelligence” companies will create massive value.

THREAD AWS $AMZN
AMZN has 15Xed in 6 years (~$60bn->~$1tr). Along the way there have been many investor concerns, which have in hindsight been "can't see the forest for the trees" nitpicks: 1) AWS not profitable; 2) AWS price cuts; 3) Depr acctg; 4) Too much start up exposure.

First to establish valuation. I don’t think it is controversial to say that AWS is worth ~$1tr+ today annualizing nearly $50bn in revs this past Q, ~35% GAAP Op Margins growing ~30% in COVID times. In 2021, AWS will likely put up around ~$58BN in revenue (MSe).

While IaaS is not SaaS, applying even the lower end of Software universe multiples to this level of growth (not to mention profitability or any analysis of how great the business is) would get you to a $1trillion value: 16X EV/Sales ~$60bn in revs ~= $1tr.

And AWS is a lot more profitable than most software companies (today). On a P/E basis, this equates to ~60X 2021 GAAP EPS (assumes 20% Tax rate).
 
Looking back on it, it is funny to think about a few of the past AWS bear cases/worries:

1) AWS not profitable
AMZN first disclosed AWS financials on the 1Q15 print. Before AMZN disclosed AWS revs/EBIT, the consensus was the MORE unprofitable AWS was, the better it was for AMZN’s stock because it meant the retail business was even more profitable than people thought.

If you're a college student who wants to pay off all your loans... here's an idea for you:

It takes ~$5k to start and will make ~$30k a year of profit

It won't get you rich, it'll pay for college.

(..and will teach them more about business than they’ll learn in school)

The idea isn’t sexy. But it works:

**Plastic Moving Bin Rentals**

Everyone knows moving sucks. The worst part is being stuck with 400 cardboard boxes at the end of your move.

Instead - @benmlevy told me about Gorilla Bins. They dropoff plastic moving bins, & pickem up later.

Let’s break it down. Our goal is to pay for college (~$30k profit per year).

To do that, I think we’ll need $50k in revenue.

The avg move (a 2 bedroom apartment) is $180

To hit our goal, we need do ~5.5 moves per week

COSTS?

How many bins do we need to buy up front?

5.5 moves a week x 50 bins = you need 275 bins. Let’s round up to 300 to be safe.

Ok let’s hop over to @uline to see how much these bins cost

Bingo. Bins cost about $15 a piece.

$15 x 300 bins = $4,500 initial startup costs.

Time to beg your parents or a rich aunt to lend you money to get the biz rolling (...or just take $5k of student loan money and invest it here…)

What a privilege it was to host @Gautam__Baid for my first ever Twitter Spaces event along with @dadalife369 and @Finvents.

While we wait for the YouTube recording. Here are 8 of my biggest takeaways from today's session.

#investing

1 - Start by coming up with a portfolio allocation strategy based on your aims and objectives for investing. Include flexibility, tracking and rebalancing as part of your strategy.

2 - Learn from those who succeeded before you to ultimately develop your own investing style

Here are three books that influence @Gautam__Baid's investing style - They are some of the best books in investing along with Gautam's The Joys of Compounding.

3 - Develop a robust repository of sources from which you can generate investment ideas.

Here are the ones @Gautam__Baid uses.

It is a super-comprehensive list.

4 - Focus on the process as opposed to the outcomes. This is very important.

Developing a superior process leads to the repeatability of exceptional outcomes.

This interview from @OSchiffey has great quotes that directly refute the nonsense that many privacy advocates spout about how the death of cross-site tracking will help ad-supported publishers on the open web. https://t.co/bj1gWPKOei 1/

The interview is with a senior leader at a major global ad agency. Someone who actually knows what advertisers are talking about, where they are directing their spending, and what the future trends will be. Not a privacy advocate who knows nothing about the advertising market 2/

First, privacy advocates spread misinformation and bad research data that ITP hasn't hurt publisher revenue and/or hasn't affected advertiser spending. And yet here is an unequivocal answer as to the impact of ITP on advertiser spending. 3/

The agency exec also clearly shares the opinion that the end of 3PC will push money away from the open web, exactly what privacy advocates claim won't happen. 4/

She also talks about how context matters, but so does audience. Audience targeting is effectively dead without 3PC and non-Chrome browsers are doing nothing to change this. 5/

This took me 6 years to learn, I'll teach you in 2 minutes.

23 sentences that'll make you more money than a $40,997 business degree:

1. Irresistible offer - Desirable outcome + proof + scarcity + urgency + guarantee + bonuses

2. Join the most expensive gym in your city. one connection will pay for it many times over - jk

3. If you keep waiting for the “right time” you will keep wasting all of your time.

4. Don't be cheap with: doctors, lawyers and tax advisors

5. Give yourself 3 days to do it and it'll take 3 days.

Give yourself 3 hours to do it and it'll take 3 hours.

6. Send a physical gift to customers and everyone who's worked with you for more than 3 months

7. Your customer's fear of loss is more powerful than their desire for gain.