Opportunity vs. Monetizable Opportunity
you notice only those "arbs" that cannot be "arb'ed" away...
Wrote about cash-futures basis on Varsity this week: Cash is King but the Future is Basis.
Markets this Week
SEBI performed a live stress-test…
More here: country ETFs, fixed income, currencies and commodities.
Links
Research
How Water Flows Through Bangalore (welllabs)
Bengaluru’s water problems may seem contradictory. In the height of summer, borewells and lakes dry up and tankers supply water from afar. During the monsoon, large parts of the city face severe flooding. But these problems are interconnected.
Movies (NBER)
Why are certain movies more successful in some markets than others? Films that resonate more with local folklore systematically accrue higher revenue and are more likely to be screened. Films that promote risk-taking sell more in entrepreneurial societies today, rooted in traditions where characters pursue dangerous tasks successfully. Films portraying women in stereotypical roles continue to find a robust audience in societies with similar gender stereotypes in their folklore and where women today continue being relegated to subordinate positions.
Mutual Fund Flow-Performance Relation (SSRN)
We find that historical returns are a very important factor for investment flows (investors and equity) in order to choose an equity mutual fund in Europe. Furthermore, this relationship is statistically significant for most annual periods analyzed across all European countries.
Investing & Economy
20 Lessons From 20 Years of Managing Money (awealthofcommonsense)
Investors spend a lot of time thinking about edges, but not a great deal of time thinking about what is required to benefit from them. For most it is not getting the odds on our side that is the difficult thing, it is playing the game long enough so that they matter. (behaviouralinvestment)
India
From 2016 to 2024, the Kerala government created 5,839 jobs with an investment of ₹1,520.69 crores. Thats more than Rs. 25 crores per job! (livemint)
Why are so many Indians piling into stocks? (economist)
Small & Medium REITs framework to boost property fractional market growth by 10 times (livemint)
We need a new deal in agriculture. It doesn’t start with spending more, but re-purposing the expenditure. (livemint)
Our cities are unwalkable, air unbreathable and water unavailable. Is it any wonder that we are all dying of heart disease? (economist)
The RBI has decided to give consumers the power to choose between card networks such as Visa or Mastercard, among others, when a new credit card is issued. Existing credit cards, too, can be moved to a different network of the consumer's choice when they come up for renewal. (livemint)
The RBI is stepping up its fight against "exuberance" in retail lending, targeting new areas including mortgage-linked "top-up" loans, on concern about rising risks to the financial system. (reuters, ndtvprofit)
The RBI has been selected for the Risk Manager Award by Central Banking, London, as part of Central Banking Awards 2024 (centralbanking). All it took was a Rs. 38,619.34 crore sacrifice in Paytm’s market cap. (livemint)
SEBI asked small and mid-cap funds to disclose more about risks (reuters). Turns out that most of them might take more than two weeks to liquidate 25% of their small-cap portfolios (reuters).
Mr. Modi’s image rests to a large extent on his claim to be an effective steward of the world’s fastest-growing major economy. But it is the southern states that have generated much of India’s economic success. (economist)
Electoral Bonds data has been made public. A few years from now we can cry about “black-money” in politics. (reuters, livemint, economictimes, hindustantimes)
India lowered import taxes on certain electric vehicles produced by carmakers that commit to invest at least $500 million and start domestic manufacturing within three years. The policy is a big win for Tesla as it's in line with what the company had been lobbying for in New Delhi, despite pushback from domestic carmakers. (reuters)
India signed a free trade pact on Sunday with a group of European nations - Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein - committing to reduce tariffs, while New Delhi receives $100 billion in investments over the next 15 years. (reuters)
RoW
United States produces more crude oil than any country, ever (eia)
The bigger issue is whether, in the centralising, cautious and conservative era of Xi, Deng’s move from stagnation to explosive growth is doomed to reverse back into stagnation. If people come to believe that the dynamism of the recent past has been lost for good, then there is a risk of a downward spiral of disappointed hopes. But the force of 1.4bn people wanting a better life is extremely powerful. Will anything be allowed to halt it? The answer, I suspect, is still “no”.
The future of ‘communist capitalism’ in China (ft)
Zombie car factories on the rise in China as buyers opt for EVs (ft)
A.I.
AI will change adult entertainment forever. (washingtonpost)
What we do in the world with our devices cannot truly be anonymized. Your behavior is as unique as a fingerprint even in a sea of hundreds of millions of others. There is no way to anonymize your identity in a data set like geolocation. Where a phone spends most of its evenings is a good proxy for where its owner lives. Advertisers know this. Governments know this too. (wired)
As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated "content" in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels. The question is, why the fuck would anyone write the web if the only "person" who can find what they write is an AI's crawler, which ingests the writing for its own training, but has no interest in steering readers to see what you've written? If AI search ever becomes a thing, the open web will become an AI CAFO and search crawlers will increasingly end up imbibing the contents of its manure lagoon.
The Coprophagic AI crisis (pluralistic)
Odds & Ends
Nearly all demographers now appreciate that we shall likely reach peak humanity this century. All over the world, the total fertility rate (TFR) — the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime — has been falling since the 1970s. In one country after another, it has dropped under the 2.1 threshold (the “replacement rate,” allowing for childhood deaths and sex imbalances), below which the population is bound to decline. (bloomberg)