Category: Musings
Broken news
“Good times become good memories, but bad times become good lessons.” Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender. What a crazy decade the 2010s were! The tide of cheap money deluded an entire generation into thinking they were geniuses. Everything worked until 2022. You could raise $130 million for a $400 juicer (Juicero), $1.75 billion for…
Dear influencers, please stop hurting India
If you are working in financial services, you would have heard or thought about this: “India has 140 crore people, and even if 10–20% of the population starts investing…” If you look at the data, you’ll quickly realize that your assumptions are from Mars and the reality is from Venus. There are just 3.37 crore…
Stories that cause bank failures and the scars they leave
On March 10th, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 16th largest bank in the United States, collapsed. SVB was the bank of choice for US startups, faux libertarian tech bros, and VCs. As the bank was going under, there was a minor miracle. All the economists, policy wonks, semi-retired epidemiologists, anthropologists, futurists, and cultural archeologists on…
Institutional investors are just as stupid as retail investors
One of the oldest clichés in finance is that retail investors are “dumb money” and institutional investors are “smart money.” There’s some truth to the cliché. Retail investors do all sorts of silly things. They are too optimistic, trade their pants off, take unnecessary risks, buy shiny objects, chase performance, form cults, cause market mispricing,…
Never better or getting worse?
If you listen to Steven Pinker, he’ll tell you the world has never been a better place: Some graphs track increases in good things: income, longevity, sustenance, safety, literacy, democracy, civil rights, leisure and happiness. Others show declines in bad things: poverty, infant mortality, famine, state-sponsored torture, capital punishment, war, homicides, lynchings and racist attitudes.…
Work from home: good, bad, or ugly?
There was a lot of chatter about work from home last week. A lot of these were the same old debates about whether work from home is good or bad. Is work from home increasing productivity or hurting it?
Trillion dollar problems
Microsoft hit $2 trillion in marketcap a few days ago. There was a time when a trillion meant something, but it doesn’t seem so anymore. Microsoft and Apple now are worth over $2 trillion. It’s a silly comparison, but for context, the market cap of all listed companies on NSE is a little over $3…