In last week’s 3L-3S, we featured a piece on how the emergence of headphones are actually influencing the sort of music being produced. This piece in the Economist looks at the business side of things for ‘earwear’. The numbers are indeed staggering: “Apple does not release figures for any of its “wearables”, but AirPods are the fastest-growing […]
Michael Mauboussin, director of research at BlueMountain Capital Management, has conducted a study which looks at the ideal team size for an asset management firm seeking to beat the market. He finds that funds managed by a team do better than funds managed by a single individual. That begs the question “What is the ideal […]
This video on Youtube of a marine conservation biologist trying to help a sea turtle relieve of a plastic straw up its nostril went viral with 38m views. Similar gut wrenching videos of vast swathes of plastic dumped in the ocean – the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (supposedly twice the size of Texas) – have inspired some people to […]
If there’s one thing that has made smartphones the gamechanging tech of our lifetimes, it is the use of location data – think Amazon’s delivery efficiencies or ride sharing or food delivery, etc. Whilst all these are examples of how businesses and consumers alike have benefited from the technology, there is a dark side to […]
When the economist, Thomas Phillipon, moved to America in 1999, he found a country where high quality products were available at “dazzlingly cheap” prices. “But over the past two decades, Mr Philippon writes in “The Great Reversal”, this paradise has been lost. Europeans now enjoy cheap cross-continent flights, high-street banking, and phone and internet services; Americans […]
The former US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, famously said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” A robust military structure built on the foundations of unswerving training and a disciplined approach is one that is believed to win wars. This […]
We know of companies who have shot themselves in the foot going for instant glory and in the bargain sacrificing sustainability. Here’s an example of an entire industry – video gaming, which back in the 80s was bigger than Hollywood and pop music combined went bust, thanks to the mad rush for riches. Centrestage was […]
Paul Graham is an investor, especially known for having founded Y Combinator, a successful incubation platform in Silicon Valley, having incubated companies such as Airbnb, Drobbox, Doordash, etc. In this particularly insightful blog, Paul highlights the need for obsessive interest in a subject as a key ingredient for success, especially the creative kind of success. […]
David Byrne’s book “How Music Works” talks about how music composition has a context to it. “For example, he explains that medieval European music was often harmonically simple because playing lots of notes at once sounded terrible in cathedrals, and that trumpets were common in early jazz because the instrument’s high frequency could be heard over a talkative […]
As we approach the New Year, many of us are getting ready with our list of resolutions. Some of us will successfully follow through. Some of us will valiantly fight until we give up and likely push it into another New Year or any other such milestone event. It is normal to procrastinate as we […]
This piece uses a very useful framework created by John Bogle for his classic book published 30-years ago (titled “Bogle on Mutual Funds”). In that book, Bogle shows that you can decompose the investment returns generated by the stockmarket into 3 segments): dividends, earnings growth and growth in P/E. Nir Kaissar uses this framework to […]
45% of the stocks which were in the BSE500 ten years ago have exited the index since. The primary driver of these exits is shoddy corporate governance and poor capital allocation (the two are linked). In contrast, the number of companies which have significantly enriched their shareholders are a handful. Inspired by Howard Schilit’s legendary […]
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