Why are states in Nigeria not paid their share of the oil and gas earnings in the currency it was earned in, i.e., the United States Dollars (USD)?

Crude oil in Nigeria is owned by the Federation — the Federal, State, & Local Govt. Shared as follows: 13% is deducted & paid to the oil and gas producing States; next, the Federal Government (FGN) gets 52.68%; the States get 26.72%, & the Local Governments get 20.60%.

When Nigerian crude oil is sold, the proceeds are in USD and get paid to the NNPC/CBN/JPMorgan Account in the US. The Oil taxes, e.g., Petroleum Profit taxes, are also in USD and are collected by the Federal Inland Revenue Service and paid to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN

The same thing applies to the royalty bonus collected by the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) and paid to the CBN. The CBN then converts the USD sales proceeds to Naira.

The CBN and Ministry of Finance then fund Federal agencies like NEMA and the Consolidated Revenue Fund in Naira, even the 13% derivation is paid in Naira. In other words, while the CBN retains the USD, the Federal, States, and LGAs get Naira

WHY $CCIV CAN TRIPLE SOON.

What is $CCIV ?

CCIV is the fourth SPAC by Michael Klein who already has multiple multi-billion dollar SPAC mergers including $CCC valued at over 19 Billion. CCIV is in TALKS to take @LucidMotors public valuing the merger at over 15 BILLION.

What is LUCID MOTORS?

Lucid Motors is one of the worlds leading EV car "Startups" founded in 2007 in California they were previously known as Atieva. Most of their 1400 employees come from well know car companies such as TESLA and Mazda.

The Lucid motor core team

Peter Rawlinson ( CEO & CTO)

Originally from wales, peter was the Chief Engineer for the TESLA MODEL S. Peter was also the Principal Engineer at @Jaguar Chief Engineer at @lotuscars

Derek Jenkins ( Vice President of Design)

Derek started his journey with 8 years at @Audi working on the Audi A2 & A8 among others. After Audi, he moved to VW where he spent nine years. He is also credited for the design of the CX-5, Mazda6, Mazda3, and the CX-9 among others.

Lucid Air

Lucid Air is the first car by @LucidMotors which is set to release in the summer of this year. Air will have four different variants starting from 69,900 USD which will have up to a 503 MILE RANGE.

Wiley buys Hindawi -- a $298 million acquisition for GBP 25 million in annual APC revenues -- in bid to expand open-access platforms @pbasken

I'm really fascinated by several things about this acquisition. 1. One could posit that APC business models in structural decline as they are replaced by transformative agreements. Will Hindawi titles be folded into Wiley TA's or offered as a separate "pure publish" model?

2. Seems that there is little concern about geopolitical risk: "Wiley…saw value in Hindawi’s strong position in Asia, the world’s largest and fastest growing academic publishing market…“Hindawi’s significant footprint in in China is a major benefit from that perspective”"

3. It seems some in the academic community continue to be "alarmed" when, after taking advantage of private capital to fund commercial start-ups for open access services (bepress; SSRN; now Hindawi), that capital looks to sell in search of returns. As if this is a surprise!

4. Most interesting will be to see how this expansion of Wiley's OA portfolio and platforms/workflows/services can connect with its important businesses in support of society publishing.

It's been more than 60 years since Philip Fisher wrote the investment classic in "Common Stocks & Uncommon Profits".

The book is famous for the 15 questions which one must ask before investing in any company.

THREAD

These are the questions which help us in determining the "quality" of a business.

Warren Buffett has time and again said that he is 85% Graham and 15% Fisher.

Let's have a look at these 15 questions.

P.S.: Stocks listed in this thread are not to be taken as recos.

1. Does the company have products or services with sufficient market potential to make possible a sizable increase in sales for at least several years?

The important point which you must note here is that you must not just look at the size of the company.

You must also look at the opportunity size of the market in which the company exists.

Let's take the case of HDFC Bank. Although it is a huge bank, but it controls just 9% of the total credit market in India, suggesting an enormous opportunity for it to capture.

2. Does the management have a determination to continue to develop products or processes that will still further increase total sales potentials when the growth potentials of currently attractive product lines have largely been exploited?

10 Biggest Bank Robberies of All Time

Thieves made off with billions in these daring, historic heists.

A THREAD

10. The Dunbar Armored robbery

Stolen: $18.9 million

In 1997,6 men pulled off what remains the biggest cash heist in the history of the United States. The leader was Allen Pace, who turned out to be the worst "safety inspector" the Dunbar Armored trucking company ever employed.

Pace timed the security cameras at the Dunbar facility in Los Angeles so he could avoid them, and recruited five childhood friends to help him rob the vault. They broke in, assaulted two guards on their lunch breaks and loaded $18.9 million dollars into a U-Haul.

They almost got away with it — except one robber got sloppy and lent some of the stolen cash to a friend without removing the original cash straps.

9. The United California bank heist

Stolen: $30 million

In 1972, Amil Dinsio, a professional criminal from Ohio, assembled a gang of six robbers and flew them to California. They rented a town house and planned a heist on a bank where they had (mistakenly) heard President

1/x Since I promised a few investors outside Sweden/Nordics to look deeper into $CDON, with my negative customer biases aside, here's a short thread;

Let's first go through the negatives

2/x I really understand the excitement when you put on the "local dominant marketplace"-glasses and start comparing CDON multiples to the likes of $AMZN, $MELI, $SE or whatever. But with boots on the ground I can assure you, that they are *nothing* of the sort. At least yet.

3/x Just looking at GMV/revenue, after >20y in business, an "everything store", CDON doesn't even come near other local niche players like $BHG (8bSEK) or $BOOZT (4bSEK) and other private companies. They are closer to $LYKO in size, who are only selling hair & beauty..

4/x Unfortunately the brand is very much on decline (especially among young ppl) since the website has been mistreated for years and years, so I think they have to work extremely hard on building trust + enhance customer experience to even have a change long term.

5/x Like I wrote yesterday we have a very divided (in a good way) eCommerce market in the Nordics, with lots of amazing niche players with top notch customer experience. To put it in words you understand, we are a more $SHOP like region with independent businesses.

Some interesting snippets from @MotilalOswalLtd 25th Wealth Creation Study:

(A Short thread)

1. Consumer/Retail is the biggest wealth-creating sector over 25 years.

2. Almost 60 of the top 100 market cap companies in 1995 did not make it to the Wealth Creators list.

3.Corporate profit to GDP at all-time lows + Market cap to GDP close to an all-time high.

4. Permanent change in the long term interest rate band is leading to a change in valuation expectations.

5. Twenty-five stocks for the next twenty-five years. Read the Disclaimer.

Terry Smith is often referred to as "the English Warren Buffett".

He runs Fundsmith which has a fund size of £27.9bn.

Despite the size, Fundsmith did a CAGR of 18.4%.

In his book Investing for Growth, he explains his investing philosophy.

Here's a breakdown:

1. Fundsmith's winning formula

Find companies that focus on delivering value.

Not those who are looking to pacify Wall Street with short-term results.

2. Avoiding "cheap" companies?

Low multiples are not a reason to buy a company.

A ship will continue to sink if it has a hole in it.

"A stock may have a low valuation but an even lower intrinsic value. Buying such a stock is not a recipe for investment success."

3. Getting quality right

For long-term investors, getting the quality of the business is more important than the valuation.

“An investor could have paid 281 times earnings for L’Oréal, 156 times for Colgate, and 147 times for Brown-Forman and still beat the market.”

4. "Unprofitable" companies could be good investments

Many of the best companies don't show earnings today.

But that's because they're heavily reinvesting for the future.

It's just that the earnings hasn't show up.

Get a cup of coffee.

Let's kickstart 2022!

To that end, here are 22 key concepts to help you appreciate and achieve Financial Independence.

Concept #1.

What is Financial Independence?

It's a state of *self-sufficiency*. It's when you have enough money, and enough income-producing assets, that you and your family can live comfortably for the rest of your lives -- WITHOUT needing a job.

Concept #2.

Financial Independence is not really about spending MONEY how we like -- although, to an extent, that becomes possible.

It's about being FREE to spend our TIME how we like.

Concept #3.

Financial Independence is not really about quitting our jobs and retiring from work -- although that's possible.

It's about being FREE to pursue *whatever* kind of work we find most fulfilling. Things we love to do. Things the world benefits from. Etc.

Concept #4.

For most of us, the path to Financial Independence consists of:

- Starting Early,
- Saving Diligently, and
- Investing Responsibly.

Here's an inspiring story of a janitor who amassed an $8M fortune by following this very playbook:

Our intuitions often leads us astray. A good reminder: study counterintuitive math and economic results.

Here are 9 of them 🧵

The Birthday Paradox

In a room of 23 people, there's a >50% chance that 2 people share the same birthday.

This type of probabilistic thinking does *not* come naturally to many people.

The Coastline Paradox

Fractal geometry is also confounding:

The coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined measurement. As the unit of measurement gets smaller (eg. from KMs to cm), the length increases without limit.

Winner's Curse

In an auction, the winning bid will usually exceed the intrinsic worth of an item leading to a significant overpay (and negative net profit for the winner).

Braess's Paradox

Removing an extra road can make everyone's commute time faster.

Why? The existence of a "fast" road leads to congestion because everyone uses it. If you remove the shortcut, traffic flows better.

🤔 Thread: More of the wrong thing is less
(or, how I stepped off the hamster wheel)

I’m going to share a personal story with hope that it inspires at least one person to re-examine their definition of success 👇

Through hard work and an unfair share of luck, I’ve done some cool “bucket list” things in my career:

✅Raised VC from the worlds’ top firms
✅Helped build 100’s of millions in revenue from nothing
✅Rang the bell at the NYSE
✅Met & did deals with billionaires & business icons

These are things I dreamed about when I was young and I treasure some of the memories. But when they finally happened I felt surprisingly unfulfilled. I was scoring lots of points but didn’t feel like I was winning.

Then a few years ago during a board meeting I had a moment of clarity. I looked around the table at 10 people, all absurdly successful by financial measures. There wasn’t a single person I wanted to emulate. Most were unhealthy and several had told me that they were unhappy.

Within months I walked away from from a 7-figure salary, moved my family to Boulder, & haven’t looked back. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a capitalist & like money as much as anyone. But for me it's not the thing, and *more of the wrong thing is less*.

Today we're gonna talk about profits. They come from stock! #AdamSmith reminds us that stock is any resource paid for in advance when doing business. In general, profits and wages don't move together. (I.ix.1–2) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

As stock goes up, there's more of it to employ more workers (by paying them or providing machines for them to work or both). This raises wages! But new stock competes with existing stock, which tends to lower profit. (I.ix.2) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

If you thought figuring out the average wages of labor was complicated, don't even think about trying to figure out the average profit of stock. Basically impossible. Luckily, the rate of interest tends to vary with the profits of stock. (I.ix.3–4) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

Lots of laws have tried to control interest rates and stop usury. They've all failed to do either. (I.ix.5–9) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

Profits and wages rising together is unusual, but it happens. In particular, in new colonies. (I.ix.11) #WealthOfTweets #SmithTweets

1/ A lot of people ask me how Bleacher Report found our first writers when we were tiny and had no funding.

So here's a thread on all the things we tried, what worked best, and lessons on growing a community from scratch:

2/ When we first started B/R, all the articles were written by my co-founders, our friends, and me.

This led to some hilariously bad takes. Like this article where I panned the SF Giants for drafting future World Series MVP Madison Bumgarner.

3/ When we were ready to start building our community, we started with word of mouth. We drafted an email pitching our concept. It went out to everyone we knew, asking them to share it with anyone who would be interested.

This got us maybe a few dozen signups.

From the email:

4/ With only a handful of members, we needed to make the community feel more active.

So we faked it til we made it.

Our team created multiple accounts and posted using different fake names. This created the sense of more activity and encouraged new members to join in.

5/ Later, I learned that the founders of Reddit did the same thing early on.

Sometimes the solution to the "chicken and the egg" problem of building community is to create the illusion of more chickens (or

GS Tactical Fund Flows 2021 - some interesting tidbits:

We are set up to see a massive wave of inflows [in 2021]. The “January Effect” will be exceptionally strong this year. Investors are looking to buy the dips, but they remain shallow as there is competition for dip alpha.

Global stocks are now worth equal to 116% of Global GDP, the highest level since 2007.

AAIIBEAR Index “Da Bears” just logged a reading of sub 22.00, the lowest reading since January 2nd. The Bulls logged their longest euphoria reading since January 2018. Euphoria is high.

The month of January see’s a 37% of yearly inflows as a result of 401k and asset allocation rebalancing. Can see financial advisors recommending a portfolio shift back into equities given the current defensive allocation.

Over the last 25 yrs, 25bps of AUM of new money comes into the market each January. This is a big number on $20 Trillion worth of fund assets. This would be about +$50B worth of buy demand, and 2021 could see at least double this year.

The Nasdaq hit its 55th record close of the year on Monday and has gained almost 44% this year. There may be some FOMO.

This flow of funds shift will get exacerbated this year given the heavy positioning in money markets and bonds, aka TINA, or lack of alternatives.