ESG In Vogue
The area of Socially Responsible Investing has unfortunately become home to more marketers than investors. It is becoming increasingly difficult to parse through a complex landscape and identify suitable opportunities which both provide a reasonable return profile, and live up to their ESG promise. The fact that people are paying attention to these issues is undoubtedly a positive trend, but in our experience, it requires serious effort and an increasing level of sophistication to separate the brochures from reality.
Howard Marks provides another prescient piece where he systematically analyzes the most common reasons that “this time is different” in the markets. Marks’ writing serves as a consistent grounding in reality that we are all well-served reading.
What do all the theories propounded above have in common? That’s easy: they’re optimistic. Each one provides an explanation of why things should go well in the future, in ways that didn’t always go well in the past.
In recent years, the U.S. has simultaneously experienced economic growth, low inflation, expanding deficits and debt, low interest rates and rising financial markets. It’s important to recognize that these things are essentially incompatible. They generally haven’t co-existed historically, and it’s not prudent to assume they will do so in the future.
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A great piece on the value of living your life via an inner scorecard. External parties have their own biases in judgement which may not fit your personal measures of success. Waking up every morning and competing with yourself to improve every day is a great recipe for long term growth.
The most important things in life are measured internally. Thinking about what matters to you is hard. Playing to someone else’s scoreboard is easy, that’s why a lot of people do it. But winning the wrong game is pointless and empty. You get one life. Play your own game.
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Mary Meeker has released her annual internet trends report – something we look forward to every year. Since we recognize it is unlikely many people have the time or inclination to review 333 slides, here are a few of the more interesting points:
- Global new smartphone shipments declined 4% year-over-year as saturation hit the market
- E-commerce growth is slowing but was still up 12.4% year-over-year (compares to 2% in physical retail)
- Daily hours spent on digital media in the U.S. is at an all time high of 6.3 hours (!)
- Mobile consumption topped traditional TV for the 1st time ever in 2018
- There are now >2.4 billion gamers globally creating a massive end market everything from streaming to social interaction
- Adults trying to limit smartphone use has grown to 63% from 47% year-over-year but the percentage of adults “almost constantly” online has increased to 26% from 21% in 2015
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Our caveat here is that this was written by someone who very clearly is not fond of Uber. It is, however, one of the most thorough dissections of Uber’s business model that we have come across.
The deep dive into some of the inherent issues in urban transportation, such as the high costs of peak capacity, we hadn’t fully understood.
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Earlier this month, two of our colleagues – Kyle MacDonald and Jeff Gallant – were awarded Canada’s Top 40 Under 40. In case it is of interest, view the formal press release.