Trend: Rising (Investment) Protectionism
Trend: China Trying to Improve Financial Stability
Secretive Financial Group Unloads $3.5B Trust (CX, May-24) // Tomorrow Holdings Group
Troubled Anbang Kicks Off Asset Sales (CX, May-23)
[zh] Zhou Xiaochun talks about 4 areas of responsibility for Financial Stability Committee (HX, Mar-14)
[zh] China sets up Financial Stability Committee (gov.cn, 2017-Nov)
Investing
The Playing Field (M) –
For investors, I’ve come to think of five levels of the game:
1. Apprentice — learning the game.
2. Expert — mastering the game you were taught.
3. Professional — making the game you were taught fit your own strengths and weaknesses.
4. Master — changing the game you play as part of your own self-expression and operating at scale. 5. Steward — becoming part of the playing field itself and mentoring the next generation
Technology
Artificial Intelligence—The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet (M) // Overview of the current state of AI, what’s missing and where it can go. Recommend reading in full.
To cut a long story short, I discovered that a statistical analysis had been done a decade previously in the UK, where these white spots, which reflect calcium buildup, were indeed established as a predictor of Down syndrome. But I also noticed that the imaging machine used in our test had a few hundred more pixels per square inch than the machine used in the UK study. I went back to tell the geneticist that I believed that the white spots were likely false positives — that they were literally “white noise.” She said “Ah, that explains why we started seeing an uptick in Down syndrome diagnoses a few years ago; it’s when the new machine arrived.”
Software 2018: Where We Are Now and Where Are We Going? (Battery Ventures) // Presentation with a good overview of software/SaaS industry. If you are interested in this space, you will want to carefully go through this deck.
The nightmare for the U.S. financial industry is that a technology company—whether from China or a homegrown juggernaut such as Amazon.com Inc. or Facebook Inc.—replicates the success of Alipay and WeChat in America. The stakes are enormous, potentially carving away billions of dollars in annual revenue from major banks and other firms. What follows is a breakdown of what that could look like—theoretically—using the explosive growth as China’s apps as a rough guide.
Policy
China and the International Order (RAND) – This report evaluates the character and possible future of China’s engagement with the postwar order. The resulting portrait is anything but straightforward: China’s engagement with the order remains a complex, often contradictory work in progress.
Truth Decay (RAND) – Truth decay has four underlying trends: (1) Increasing disagreement about facts and data, (2) A blurring of the line between opinion and fact, (3) The increasing relative volume and resulting influence of opinion over fact, (4) Declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information
LongHedge 