Investing/Business

The Ruthless, Secretive and Sometimes Seedy World of Hedge Fund Private Investigations Highly entertaining expose.

Listening to Barakett talk about some of his wildest cases gives some idea of how easy it is for people to fall through the cracks during cursory due diligence. For example, on its website, DDC says it once found that “the president of a large U.S. asset manager was arrested twice for major art theft” but was never charged due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.

The art theft case was a “thing of beauty,” Barakett recalls. The manager, who still runs $2 billion, was even discovered to have one of the stolen paintings in his office when a police investigator went to interview him regarding the second theft. (The man was in college at the time of the thefts, which were from the university.) DDC’s client, a family office considering making a big investment, “could not believe what we were telling them,” Barakett says. It decided to walk away.

Another case involved a Bear Stearns executive whose murder conviction had previously gone undetected because, Barakett suspects, a casual background check either did not look at records in every state he had lived in or checked the wrong name or date of birth. “Our client [an asset manager who was considering hiring the man for an IR position] could not believe it, and we showed him the proof,” he recalls.

Vanguard Patented a Way to Avoid Taxes on Mutual Funds Interesting implications for tax policy, fund structuring and intellectual property strategy.

Vanguard has discussed licensing its hybrid ETF-mutual fund design to other firms, but no deal has come to fruition, according to people with knowledge of the talks. Those that have expressed interest included both index followers and active stock-pickers. United Services Automobile Association licensed the patent but never used it, and Van Eck Associates Corp. once sought regulatory approval for a similar design. Spokesmen for USAA and Van Eck declined to comment

Biglari Holdings is the Fyre Festival of Capitalism Hilarious because I’m not a shareholder in this company.

Many managements probably revile their shareholders, but most of them do not publicly delight in doing so. Sardar Biglari and Phil Cooley, Chairman and Vice Chairman of Biglari Holdings, seem to delight in the annoyance of its shareholders. At one point laughing at them for being upset that the share price went down 58% last year and then subsequently watching the board increase Sardar’s compensation package. It is not my best-self that enjoyed this spectacle, it was more like the part of me that likes watching dragons fight dragons on Game of Thrones that was riveted by Sardar Biglari and Phil Cooley or the part of me that once saw two clowns get into a fist fight at a kid’s party in St. Petersburg and rather enjoyed it.

Buspirone Shortage in Healthcaristan SSR Close look at weird incentives and unintended consequences of regulation in the generic drugs market.

You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax. Unfortunately, the FDA is inadvertently taxing companies for being in the generic drug business. And it’s taxing them more if they’re not a monopolist with economies of scale. That means we get fewer companies in the generics industry, and more monopolists.

So my very tentative guess as to why buspirone is more plagued by shortages than bread or chairs is because number one, the need for FDA approval makes it hard for new companies to enter the buspirone industry, and number two, the FDA’s fee structure favors large-scale monopolies over small-scale competitors.

Why So Many Investors Missed Nike’s Stock Rebound Good case study

Legendary stock-picker Peter Lynch’s maxim to “buy what you know” has long been misconstrued to mean invest in the everyday products you consume. That’s not quite right, as it only reflects part of his investment strategy. The other half is buying what you have a unique insight into that the market has yet to figure out. Knowing what those things are is the hard part.

Artko Capital 2019Q1 Letter Interesting commentary around position sizing.

This is where the “Valeant problem” that is rarely discussed, becomes an issue for us: what to do with a position that rapidly increases in size relative to the rest of the portfolio and where Hahn Capital Management and Sequoia/Value Act approaches to the matter differed. While the latter funds continued to hold, and allowed the single position to become almost a third of their portfolio, Hahn Capital had strict risk controls and processes in places that forced them to sell down the position to at least 4% of the portfolio when it became 6% of the portfolio’s weight. Luckily for Hahn, they exited the position prior to the spectacular blow up while the other aforementioned funds suffered significant double-digit portfolio losses when the truth about Valeant’s practices became public. Of course that is not to take away from the spectacular track records of all of the aforementioned funds, but to point out how different investment strategies (concentrated versus diversified), portfolio manager incentives (Management Fee Only versus Performance Carried Interest), and risk control processes (on single position sizes) can result in very different portfolio returns and risk profiles for different shareholders of the same stock. To put another way, sometimes a sell decision is not one of security analysis but one of portfolio risk management and fund strategies. As a result of this, and other similar experiences throughout our career, we have tried to approach the middle ground of the two styles by having a strong degree of concentration and conviction in our portfolio while still maintaining a robust portfolio risk management process focusing on capital preservation, position size, and its risk-reward ratio relative to the rest of the portfolio.

Additionally, we believe the other lesson to be learned from Valeant was no matter how high of a conviction, knowledge base or confidence you have in a publicly traded company or its management, at the end of the day things can and occasionally do go unpredictably wrong and are out of your control. This is a staple of public equities investing and is a common mistake made by even the most reputable investors: having the illusion of control.

An Ancient Relationship: FinTech and Financial Advice Classic look at an ancient profession. Interesting how the stock ticker seemed to have an impact almost as large as the internet.

How has this profession lasted so long? The industry’s longevity is largely attributable to financial technology (FinTech), which has historically empowered advisers to better serve their clients. Many companies, for example, offer advisers quantitative and accurate measurement of investors’ risk tolerance. Equipped with this technology, advisers have a better sense of how clients will respond to volatility, and can construct portfolios that most accurately reflect a client’s ability to endure market swings.

The ticker technology served as a means for democratizing access to market information. Prior to its invention, only those physically present at the stock exchange – or very close by – were privy to real-time market prices. Everyone else received their data at a substantial lag, often to the point where it was no longer useful. Once the ticker was released, however, cables and telegraphs connected brokers across the country to a network of data constantly flowing from a central source, the New York Stock Exchange. According to Horace Hotchkiss, 23,000 offices paid for ticker services in the United States

In Defense of Complexity Most people are knee jerk advocates of simplicity, but forget what lies beneath.

But simple is impossible without complex. Simple is how you interact with your web browser or an app on your phone. Complex is everything else happening in the background that allows it to function.

There are some valuable and diversifying asset classes that routinely get discarded to the “Too Complex” pile for reasons related to ambiguous classification, unfamiliar tools, novel wrappers and peer/career risk. Which is unfortunate, because I would argue that certain alternative investments are complex in implementation only. Conceptually, they are often quite simple, intuitive, backed by data and grounded in economic theory. The arc of the investable universe is long, and it bends towards democratization and innovation. Not every shiny new toy deserves a spot in your portfolio, but it would be wise to reconsider exactly what constitutes simplicity in investing.

Geopolitics and History

Robert Caro Interview

You read in every textbook that cliché: Power corrupts. In my opinion, I’ve learned that power does not always corrupt. Power can cleanse. When you’re climbing to get power, you have to use whatever methods are necessary, and you have to conceal your aims. Because if people knew your aims, it might make them not want to give you power. Prime example: the southern senators who raised Lyndon Johnson up in the Senate. They did that because he had made them believe that he felt the same way they did about black people and segregation. But then when you get power, you can do what you want. So power reveals. Do I want people to know that? Yes.

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There’s always something the other guy doesn’t want to tell you, and the longer the conversation goes, the easier it is to figure that out

Peter Frankopan Interview

The one thing we haven’t had mercifully over the last 60 year except for the breakdown of Yugoslavia, and Iraq and so on is a major confrontation between big powers wanting to escalate.

Philosophy/Psychology Etc

On the Collaboration Between psychiatrist Carl Jung, and Physicist Wolfgang Pauli

While there is a long and lamentable history of science — physics in particular — being hijacked for mystical and New Age ideologies, two things make Jung and Pauli’s collaboration notable. First, the analogies between physics and alchemical symbolism were drawn not only by a serious scientist, but by one who would soon receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. Second, the warping of science into pseudoscience and mysticism tends to happen when scientific principles are transposed onto nonscientific domains with a false direct equivalence. Pauli, by contrast, was deliberate in staying at the level of analogy — that is, of conceptual parallels furnishing metaphors for abstract thought that can advance ideas in each of the two disciplines, but with very different concrete application.

What If We Already Know How to Live?

Philosophy is, in part, kept alive by ever-changing sociocultural circumstances that demand new lived responses to its question. But the changes brought by the digital age are of a magnitude beyond the routine vicissitudes of history. The global distribution of knowledge is arming, perhaps overloading us with more information than ever before, and the proliferation of digital interfaces is reprogramming how we experience life itself, our attentive and perceptual faculties.

…What I’m getting at is the possibility that the basic human conundrum is no longer driven by a deficiency in discovery, but in design. That now more than ever, we’re equipped with the information needed to live well, but aren’t integrating that information into our daily routines, our lived realities. There’s a lag between what we’re discovering and how we’re living.

The flood of information made available through the internet filled the discovery container with more than it can hold. We’re spilling things, getting the fabric of human life all wet. These moments of imbalance are when priority shifts from discovery to design. At these points, the work falls upon those positioned between the two containers, using what we’ve discovered to imagine and implement new designs, to convert influxes of knowledge into wisdom that can be embedded into the internal logic of our ecologies, enriching the relational environments from which our sense of being is woven.

The Year the Singularity Was Cancelled

In other words, the singularity got cancelled because we no longer have a surefire way to convert money into researchers. The old way was more money = more food = more population = more researchers. The new way is just more money = send more people to college, and screw all that.

But AI potentially offers a way to convert money into researchers. Money = build more AIs = more research.

If this were true, then once AI comes around – even if it isn’t much smarter than humans – then as long as the computational power you can invest into researching a given field increases with the amount of money you have, hyperbolic growth is back on. Faster growth rates means more money means more AIs researching new technology means even faster growth rates, and so on to infinity.

Presumably you would eventually hit some other bottleneck, but things could get very strange before that happens