Being Bearish Doesn’t Make You Smart George Soros was the G.O.A.T (Greatest of All Time) but his protege, Stanley Druckenmiller, wasn’t bad either. He delivered spectacular returns throughout the 1980s and 1990s (+30% annually for a long time!). He always seemed to be early on emerging themes and crucially acted…

How does Canva really stack up? For a long time, the author has argued that a big scandal is brewing in the Venture Capital world. This is a direct result of the opinion leaders in Venture Capital not being subject to the rigorous questioning and analysis that other areas of…

Lina Khan is impressive. She’s 33 and the Chairperson of the Federal Trade Commission. That’s no mean feat. A legal scholar, her student article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” was published by the Yale Law Journal when she was still there. The article argued that the focus of anti-trust laws was not…

Pablo Picasso said, “good artists copy, great artists steal.” That’s why Jordan Peterson’s “spontaneous” speech about the Queen last week was so eloquent. Most of the ideas were “stolen” from a book by Winston Churchill. In “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples”, Churchill argued that despite many errors, the British…

Without the porn industry, we might not have had Mark Zuckerberg (good thing?). A long time before Mark noticed kids at Harvard liked to share photos of themselves, hard-nosed porn industry veterans in Las Vegas and The Valley (LA) had appreciated how significant the internet was for their industry. For…

Some Things Don’t Last The Japanese have many expressions with no direct translation into English. Mono no aware is an example of one. The expression is linked to the Buddhist concept of ephemerality: everything must pass but, in the passing, there is beauty. It explains the peculiar Japanese aesthetic that…

Bloomberg reports that Zillow is suspending its I-Buying business for 2021. The schadenfreude is palpable. There are lot of “I told you so” comments going around. But perhaps the negativity is a little misplaced. I-buying is a market-making business and market-making businesses are hard to get right, especially when it…

Barbara Corcoran, the former US Shark Tank celebrity and famous NYC real estate entrepreneur, often points out there are two types of people: Containers and Expanders. Containers are the people who fret the small stuff. They worry about details and like to have a plan. Expanders are the opposite. They…

In an age when strong female role models are celebrated, it is surprising how little attention is paid to Ida Tarbell. Ida took down a monopoly. Her actions led to the implementation of anti-trust laws in the US and the establishment of the Fair Trade Commission in 1914. She came…