Month: October 2021

Jim Chanos is a famous market short-seller who built a reputation on predicting the collapse of Enron early and shorting the stock. For the past decade, Chanos has been a skeptic of China’s economy and in particular, of their real estate boom.

If you’re on the internet, it’s likely that you’ve heard of cryptocurrency, or more specifically Bitcoin. Put simply, these are digital currencies. This means there are no physical little gold bitcoins that you can take to the supermarket to buy your groceries and no institution or organisation (i.e. a bank) that’s controlling your transactions – they all exist solely online (aka digitally).

Legend has it, a few years ago, Jeff Bezos demanded that his team at Amazon Studios create a fantasy epic that would put Game of Thrones to shame. What resulted was Wheel of Time - an incredibly expensive attempt to create the next global fantasy phenomenon.

At first there were the two big names, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. Soon there will be hundreds, maybe even thousands, of players in the ‘meat mimicking’ business. There are those, like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, that are working on plant-based substitutes.

Semiconductors have been a major topic of conversation this year, as shortages of these crucial components have affected every industry across every country. That is how important they are. Yet, surprisingly for such a critical component, the number of companies able to manufacture them has fallen.

Great businesses like search engines rarely go on sale. We’ve all watched Google and seen how special search can be. Only four countries in the world have developed their own search businesses: US, China, Korea and Russia.

ESG awareness among investors continues to increase on a global scale. This has been made most evident via the growing prominence of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) among institutional investors.

Since the turn of the decade, the not-so-roaring 2020s have been just over 18 months of monumental change when it comes to how we get things done. For Australians, 2020 started with the bushfires and was followed by the pandemic and the heart-wrenching destruction of the 46,000-year-old sacred Indigenous Juukan Gorge.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a massive increase in online scams. We’ve all been frustrated lately by the amount of scam text messages and phone calls. In the UK, a consumer group found that phone and text fraud was up 83% during the pandemic.

Women have a savings problem. The way that the majority of us are building financial security and wellbeing is all wrong. How many times have you been told that if you want more money, you need to cut back

One of our favourite mental models here at Equity Mates is Carlota Perez’s ‘lifecycle of a technology revolution’. From her book ‘Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital’ it argued that new technology emerged in two periods - an installation period and a deployment period.

A growing number of cancer patients, especially those with breast and lung cancers, are being spared chemotherapy and are able to explore other options. For decades, chemotherapy has been the best option when treating cancer.

We’ve heard it over and over again, global supply chains are a mess. Truck driver shortages in the UK have caused a petrol shortage. Backlogs of container ships are leading to product shortages on the shelves of US grocery stores.

One of the most interesting industries to watch over the past few years is the global payments industry. Writing from Australia, we’ve been on the forefront of this global disruption.

Do you ever just wonder how much easier life would be if you won the lottery? If you could donate to your favourite cause, or take the holiday without contemplating money?

Stock exchanges have been a great source of returns for investors over the years. The ASX in Australia, ICE (owner of the NYSE) in America or the London Stock Exchange Group in the UK all enjoy near-monopolies in facilitating the trading of stocks, derivatives and commodities in their respective countries.

Yemen is in the middle of a civil war - the Saudi-backed, Yemeni government have been fighting with Iranian-backed, Houthi rebels since 2014. Throw in the presence of unaligned tribal groups and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and this has become one of the most intractable conflicts of the past decade.

Have you been thinking about investing, but have no idea where to start? Or what to actually invest in? Let us be your investment guides. I bet we won’t be the first or the last to tell you not to put all your eggs in one basket.

Aikya is a UK-based fund manager that looks for long-term opportunities in emerging markets. In this investor letter they’ve written about the risk of investing in China - using the analogy of foie gras, as the Chinese state fattens up companies and mints billionaires only to decide to consume them when they get too large.

Credit Suisse have put together this research report covering the growing list of South-East Asian unicorns (unicorns is the term used for private startups valued at $1 billion or more). The list of companies is impressive (and growing).

Facebook has been jumping from one scandal to the next for the past five years. Political interference, fake news, vaccine misinformation, antitrust concerns. In this context, the latest scandal - a whistleblower revealing the company knew its products could cause meaningful harm - does not seem to be that different. Especially as this is not the first whistleblower in Facebook’s history.

Long-time Apple watchers have noticed a change at the $2 trillion company. Employees are organising and pushing back on an executive team that has traditionally held a very tight grip on the decision-making at the company. One thing is being blamed for this power shift - Slack.

Every quarter, J.P. Morgan publish a guide to the markets - a deck filled with charts and data that offer plenty of inside on where the market is and where it may go. After an incredible 18 months of stock market growth, a number of indicators suggest that the market could be quite expensive

Over the past few weeks, the world has been watching the Chinese real estate market and wondering if the debt problems there will spread to the rest of the economy, or even the rest of the world. In this explainer, the authors try to unpack what could happen next and why the possibility of an Evergrande collapse may not be the catastrophic event some market watchers predict.

Netflix’s latest smash hit was somewhat unexpected. Squid Game, the 9-part series out of South Korea has been described as a combination of Parasite and Hunger Games and currently enjoys a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Just two weeks after its premiere, it has become the #1 Netflix show in 90 counties, including the US.