Curiosity@Intelsense
Multidisciplinary learning is one of the best ways to improve our investment acumen. Here is a summary of some of the best learnings of the week. If you like this collection, consider forwarding it to someone who you think will appreciate it.
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Weekly Reading
Electric vehicles are quickly becoming mainstream. My expectation is over the next ten years, nearly all new two-wheelers, three-wheelers and passenger vehicles (cars, SUVs etc) will be electric.
A typical EV takes around 30 minutes or more to charge with a high-powered DC fast charger. But researchers at Penn State University published a study in Nature revealing they have developed an EV battery that, crucially, can charge up to about 70% capacity in roughly 10 minutes.
The technology can work for any size of battery, but perhaps the biggest benefit is that it will enable automakers to sell EVs with smaller batteries without triggering consumers’ range anxiety. The faster a battery can charge, the less need there is for big battery packs with long range, since stopping to charge will be no less an inconvenience than going to a gas station. And smaller battery packs also mean cheaper EVs.
Moving away from EVs to the global economy, I read this brilliant piece from Russell Napier. In this piece, he argues that inflation is structural in nature, not cyclical. We are experiencing a fundamental shift in the inner workings of most Western economies.
In the past four decades, we have become used to the idea that our economies are guided by free markets. But we are in the process of moving to a system where a large part of the allocation of resources is not left to markets anymore.
Mind you, I’m not talking about a command economy or about Marxism, but about an economy where the government plays a significant role in the allocation of capital. This is nothing new, as it was the system that prevailed from 1939 to 1979. We have just forgotten how it works, because most economists are trained in free market economics, not in history.
I have always believed that the company you keep, the people you interact with most frequently (including the "eminent dead" as Charlie Munger puts it, about authors who have long gone) determine to a large extent the trajectory of your life.
In this article on the impact of network effects, the author argues on the same lines. What city you live in. Who you date or marry. Which job you choose. What clothes you wear. We all think we make these choices ourselves. It certainly feels like we’re in full control. But it turns out that our choices — both in our startups and in our lives — are more constrained than we think.
The unseen hand in them all is the networks that surround us and the powerful math they exert on us.
These constraints are highly determinative of how your life will turn out, guiding us inexorably down one path or another in ways that are both quite predictable. Yet these forces are typically unnoticed.
Quote of the Week
"No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future" ~ Ian Wilson, GE
All analysis that we do while investing, whether it is fundamental or technical or macro are all related to the past. We are trying to look at the past and making a best-effort judgement of the future. Sometimes, that judgement will be wrong. And sometimes, it will be right. We need to always remember this.
Audio/Video of the Week:
I came across Founders podcast by David Senra from Patrick O'Shaughnessy's podcast and have been hooked. If at any time, I have a queue of podcasts to listen to, Founders will now be at the very top. In this episode, David discusses Kobe Bryant. This is a masterclass on how grit, determination, hard work and skill combine to take Bryant to the top.
https://founders.simplecast.com/episodes/272-the-life-of-kobe-bryant