Let the data tell the story. Remove human bias. Intuitive investment ideas may seem compelling, but more often, these ideas are time-consuming, inefficient, and inferior.
Diverse thinking, innovative approaches, and a willingness to be wrong and start over typically bring superior results.
Trust the model. Data, discipline, and rigor win more often.
Recently, I gave a lecture at a graduate program focused on innovation, technological disruption, and the impact on global industries and investment opportunities. My lecture focused on digital assets and attempted to draw distinctions between disruptive and substantial opportunities and hype, nonsense, and unsustainable business models. This is a quiz given to the students that reflects the main points raised in this lecture. For fun, I am including it here because it makes a series of fundamental points that I think are especially important, and the true-false construct conveys those points with clarity.
The show analyzes emerging economic and social developments, identifying the most critical issues impacting investment success. It looks at globally disruptive changes and strategies to profit from these new market forces. Innovation, advanced technologies, geopolitics, and new interrelated factors are essential components of future investment success. Investment success combines predicting the future, the confidence to make bold choices, and the fortitude to stay with those choices. Today’s volatile and uncertain world requires new knowledge and perspective and assembling relevant facts from many diverse sources to make better decisions and achieve superior returns. Some of the world’s most important industries are being profoundly impacted by new technological innovations and platforms, such as artificial intelligence, digital assets, blockchain-based businesses, gene editing, and DNA sequencing, enabling unprecedented disruption to business and economic models. Stable predictability is increasingly anachronistic. Every company or industry will either be a disrupter or disrupted. The leading growth companies of today stand an excellent chance to be memories tomorrow.
Cryptocurrency refers to many types of digital assets, including blockchain-based businesses, NFTs, and decentralized finance. Long-term value is challenging to determine, but extreme and frequent volatility isn’t.
Collectively, the world is good at screaming about all sorts of immediate and looming crises, whether that is climate change, totalitarian governments abusing civilians and trampling on personal rights or outright genocide. A speech and a prayer suffice but we’re not going to do anything. Donation websites, lighting buildings in flag colors of abused nations, and sending hopes and prayers accomplish nothing. We send prayers. We just won’t answer them. The Ukraine war’s consequences are severalfold. Economically, global consequences may be slower and less spectacular than the dramatic Russian military invasion. But, the effects will permeate the global economy, and Russia will be the biggest long-term loser. While this does not comfort families suffering and dying in the streets of Ukrainian cities, it realigns global industries and economies, strengthens the West, and is likely to galvanize United States’ leadership in the global economy – setting up even more intense rivalry China. A big uncompromising response now is the most likely strategy to settle these dramatic issues – and if it leads to regime change in Russia, that helps everyone, especially the Russians. The US and the EU need to grow up and start acting like global leaders.
