What We’re Reading
A few good articles the Collab team came across this week …
Supply and demand
Josh on crypto values:
The biggest enemy of Bitcoin’s continued price ascent is not anything to do with Bitcoin’s own failings as a medium or exchange (which it’s terrible at, conventionally speaking). The real enemy is competition for investment dollars from other tokens. Bitcoin Cash is going to hit the platform as option number four in January. How much demand will that siphon off from BTC? Ripple just doubled and is getting all kinds of attention. Litecoin is defying gravity.
What killed the dot com and software stocks in the early 2000’s was not just their business models, but the incredible deluge of new IPOs coming to market every day. I think in 1999 there were 700 IPOs or something, three a day all year, each vying for attention and capital from a finite pool of investors.
History
The November 1974 issue of Institutional Investor asked, “Is relative performance outmoded?” The magazine stated: “[I]t doesn’t matter how a money manager fares vis-a-vis others so long as he doesn’t lose money…and helps [pension plans] meet their actuarial assumptions.”
Many years later, a leading small-stock fund manager recalled to me, half-horrified and half-amused, that he was ranked in the top tenth of his peers in 1973 and 1974. After inflation, he reminisced, he had lost only 85% of his shareholders’ money since the beginning of 1973.
Upside potential
An amazing look at Apple’s 1980 IPO:
Entrepreneur
A [six year old] YouTuber who goes byRyan ToysReview raked in over 8 billion views between June 2016 and June 2017, earning him a staggering $11 million in advertising revenue. And that doesn’t count sponsored tie-ins from brands like Power Rangers that send Ryan boxes of their latest toys to try out.
Market share
Where the action is:
By the end of November, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam accounted for nearly 80% of bitcoin trading activity globally.
Social issues
Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media.
Have a nice weekend.