Internship vs. Apprenticeship

Most things can't be taught, it needs to be absorbed

Most of the things that “just works” is the result of someone understanding the soul of the problem that needed to be solved. It is the difference between someone who builds a home vs. someone who builds a house - a home is a UI/UX problem, a house is a civil engineering problem.

Bookish knowledge, irrespective of the field you are in, is only table-stakes. You need to spend time with a skilled craftsperson to fill-in the 80% of the things that cannot be explicitly spelled out.

If you look back on spectacular blowups in financial history, most of them were precipitated by people who were fairly new to markets but were supremely confident that they had found a new-new way of making money.

Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

-Warren Buffett

Ultimately, it falls on the buyer/investor to try and understand what exactly the new-new thing is doing. It is caveat emptor all the way down.

Markets this Week

Rates up, oil down, equities survived.

Remember: it is almost never a single leg-down.

Links

A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken.

Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence

Agustin Lebron @AgustinLebron3

1/ In trading, if you're wrong 80% of the time then someone can get rich off that. Just do the opposite. Point is: "bad at trading" isn't the Washington Generals getting killed the Globetrotters every night. "Bad at trading" is being a noise trader. Bleeding away fee $ forever.

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Thoughts on US inflation (tra)

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As US rates go, so do India’s.

Ira Dugal @dugalira

#rbipolicy Some peak rate forecasts: 🏔Credit Suisse: peak at 5.65% in Oct 🏔Barclays: peak at 5.90% by Dec 🏔HSBC: 6% by Dec 🏔DB: Peak between 6-6.5% 🏔HDFC Bank: 5.75% by Dec 🏔QuantEco: 5.90% by Dec 🏔CRISIL: 5.65% by Oct, then data dependent

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Most hedge funds have become a means of converting other people’s money into personal mansions.

Robin Wigglesworth @RobinWigg

Tiger Global’s flagship hedge fund is now down 50% this year. It’s long-only fund is down 64%, depressing it’s long-term returns to under 4% annually. That’s almost 9 percentage points less than a “dumb” index tracker since its inception.

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Eliot Brown @eliotwb

What happens when you have a hedge fund that bets on: -Shopify -Cazoo -Wix -Mercado Libre -SPACs Marcho Partners, a fund run by former Chamath deputy down 84% (!) in the first 6 mo of 2022. One of biggest known hedge fund losses of the year so far

wsj.comWhat Drove This Hedge Fund to Crash 84% in Six Months?Marcho Partners lost 84% in the year’s first half, when Shopify and other growth stocks fell sharply.

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Philipp Heimberger @heimbergecon

Tax cuts for the rich lead to higher income inequality. But they do not have any significant effect on economic growth or unemployment. Evidence for 18 OECD countries over 1965-2015 in this new paper published in Socio-Economic Review:

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Ethan Mollick @emollick

Startups with less money often out-invent big companies since they have to come up with cheap approaches that break out of usual paths. This paper shows you can be as creative as a startup by starting your ideas sessions by imagining having less resources. researchgate.net/publication/28…

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The Tron Project: How Japan Almost Ruled IT (undervaluedjapan)

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What if nicotine use is no longer all that harmful? What if the real problem was always the inhalation of toxic smoke while trying to consume nicotine for its benefits? (tobaccoreporter)

Memes of the Week

Jessica Nutt @JessicaNutt96

newly minted PhDs trying to trade

Flaming_Spork @Flaming_Spork

if MS-DOS is so good, why did they never make MS-TRES?

PUNS @ThePunnyWorld

Where do rainbows go when they’re bad? Prism. It’s a light sentence