Nice article from @MESandbu. This from a theme in sellside research before Christmas. Could the pandemic break secular stagnation & deliver a decade of strong growth?

1/ Unit economic for founders thread.

Despite being a founder and a student of the subject, I missed out on a key point growing up.

Length of relationship with your customers, order frequency, product usage and utility matter.

They didn't teach me this in business school.

2/ Structured right, products used daily vs weekly vs monthly vs yearly lead to different profitability and scalability paths.

Quiz. Which business would you pick?

a) Enterprise software - US$ 250k one time license
b) Enterprise software - US$ 30k/month recurring subscription

3/ Sound's obvious? Which one did you pick?

Twice in my life I picked A. They were both great businesses, but they didn't compare to B. Especially in the long run.

Looking back, with hindsight, I know I should have picked B.

Why?

4/ Bringing in customers is hard.

When those customers leave after a few orders, your investment in that relationship is written off.

But it is not just about the relationship or investment. It is also about scale.

What are the easiest ways to scale a business?

5/ Think about it?

a) Get more customers - acquire
b) Get existing customers to order again - retain
c) Increase order size - up sell
d) Increase order frequency - cross sell / new use case
e) Get existing customers to get you new customers - referral

(b) to (e) are free.

1/ Since "liquidity" has been the buzzword these days, here's an anecdote and a powerful lesson from history about printing unlimited amounts of money. Story time. #fintwit

2/ Our story begins with Mansa Musa or Musa I of Mali, an African king who consistently figures in the list of richest people in the world (Inflation-adjusted). One of his given names was 'Lord of the (Gold) Mines of Wangara'. Lest we forget, Gold was the 'Money' in those days.

3/ One fine day in 1324, Musa decided to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Of course, it was easier said than done. Mecca was ~8,500 Kms away from Timbuktu, Mali. Ultimately he did make that journey and it has been recorded in the script "The Chronicles of the Seeker" by Mahmud Kati.

4/ Famously, he took a ton of 'money' (Gold) with him to aid in his journey (Well in his defense, it was ~8,500 Kms). About 60,000 laborers and soldiers carried 2 Kgs each and their camels carried 13 Kgs each, bringing the tally to an estimated ~1,30,000 Kgs of Gold.

5/ Being a generous King, he donated Gold left and right to every poor person he saw on the way. Regions of Cairo, Medina and Mecca became instantly 'rich'. The estimated donation is ~32,000 Kgs of Gold or ~$2 Billion in today's estimate.

I have read through the grooming report from the Home Office.

Here, in this thread, I will take you through the mathematical hoops they have jumped through in this deeply flawed analysis.

Thread 👇

It is, quite literally, a whitewash. It uses all the standard statistical tricks to avoid concluding a stark and glaring conclusion, which is otherwise plain to see. That there was a sustained, targeted and focussed attack by Pakistani men on white working class and Sikh girls.

**Choose limited data points**

One way to force a conclusion is to only range over a small and carefully chosen set of data points. In this case, the report used a limited number of use cases which largely ignored the high profile grooming gangs of Pakistani origin.

Only Rotherham was considered in earnest, as it could hardly be ignored as the start of it all.

A typical data trick is to only use one troublesome dataset - generally the most high profile one. This gives plausible denial on accusations of manipulation of source data.

_This is what we call “the domain trick”_

Today’s GDP release, and in particular how the economy has adapted, a thread.👇

After 6 months of growth, the economy started shrinking again in November as tighter restrictions were in place. (Though there were variations across Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.) (1/n)

The economy shrank by 2.6% in November. In normal times this would be a significant downturn, but it is much smaller than the falls seen with the first restrictions in the spring: April GDP fell by around 20%. In that sense it is good news. But why the smaller fall? (2/n)

Firstly, some industries remain very depressed. Airlines (air transport in the chart) for example, were operating at very low levels in October so there wasn’t much further for their output to fall. This is different from the picture in Mar/Apr. (3/n)

The same is true, though perhaps less pronounced, for bars/restaurants and other parts of the service sector. (4/n)

has anyone covering the Wall Street GME reaping and sowing gone into the fact that a lot of the GameStop and directly associated trades have been largely amplified by social listening powered mega firms doing machine learning automated trades because the “idea” of GME is popular?

like I thought this was a thing investor people & press just knew & instead it’s all just focused on the message of redditors clowning short sellers and not “the computers saw the infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters and decided That Would Be A Cool Thing To Emulate” for $$$

for those new: finance social listening is a marketing “science” that involves advanced web & social network data collectors scraping everything for nuance on companies, purchasing behavior & language, investor & finance sentiment, etc & using it to make billions of trades for $$

Musk & his core investor clique is notorious for doing this as are some other big hedge firms & finance firms - you take the raw off Bloomberg Terminal, Superdata, public social networks and headlines etc etc, machine learning the fuck out of it, collect money. A hype machine.

This has been going on for about 8 years but only got popular & competitive in the past 2, when firms realized the machines could do a better job with these data flows in setting up short term shorts & holds vs people - & they could also “game” media to effect other hype machines