An investor's notes

Reading note (09/20–09/23) A Twist in the U.S. Tariff Battle: 'It's Helping China Be More Competitive' China for years has been pushing its economy away from inexpensive exports toward advanced factories and products. That… www.wsj.com Chinese companies in the Pearl River Delta are moving low-skilled work to other places in Asia and are using more robots in their factories. “The U.S. tariffs are pushing China toward making the higher-end stuff. It’s helping China be more competitive down the road.” Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto) Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck… www.amazon.com Actionable takeaways from this book Expose your body to some stress (either physically or mentally) from time to time to make yourself stronger Look for opportunities that have great upside and limited downsides, even though the chance that the positive happens is l...

Reading note (09/24–09/30) How SiriusXM is dominating in the Spotify era On-demand music streaming services currently dominate listening time across the globe, with the two leading companies… www.digitaltrends.com SiriusXM is one of the only financially stable listening services on Earth. With over 32 million subscribers, the publicly traded company has seen steadily increasing share prices over the past decade, with a reliable profit stream and a total value of around $27 billion (Spotify 32B). As of 2015, 75 percent of all new vehicles had SiriusXM installed, many with a free trial period included. Many dealerships offer as much as a year of free SiriusXM with the purchase of a new car. Sirius has a wide variety of content. The United States’ Copyright Royalty Board voted to increase the payments from satellite radio services to 15.5 percent of revenue late in 2017, SiriusXM remains well below the rates that on-demand streaming services are forced to pay. By comparison...

Reading note 10/01–10/07 Elastic IPO | S-1 Breakdown Elastic, the leading provider of open source software (OSS) for search, filed for a $100M IPO, with the amount as a… medium.com Elastic provides Elastic cloud. They’re at $206.4M of implied ARR. Elastic’s business model is based on a combination of open source and proprietary software. The company had over 5,500 customers, over 5,000 customers, and over 2,800 customers as of July 31, 2018, April 30, 2018, and April 30, 2017, respectively. Their customers represented 32% of the Fortune 500 and 21% of the Forbes Global 2000 as of July 31, 2018. The average ACV (ARR / total customers) was $37,534 last quarter. Unlike some companies, Elastic maintains full control over the source code of their products and solutions and only Elastic employees are able to commit changes to the codebase. Elasticsearch Service is a different offering than Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Growing Our SaaS Company To $1M+ ARR: 7 Peop...

Reading note 10/08/2018–10/14/2018 为什么美国仍将是世界唯一超级大国 对《 Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower 》一书的总结。结论是美国综合国力比中国和其他国家强太多，虽然美国也有很多相对劣势。美国的领先优势至少还能延续十年，甚至知道世纪末。 尽管美国在基础设施、政府效率等指标上不具有全球领先优势，但以“资源”作为衡量实力的方法，基于决定全球影响力（国力）的财富和军事能力两项指标，美国是人类有史以来最强大的国家，也是当今世界唯一的超级大国，这种格局将持续数十年，甚至延续至世纪末，而目前正处于这种格局的中继。 中国自1990年以来，全要素生产率（TFP）的提高仅贡献了经济增长的3–10%，而美国过去一个世纪的经济增长，TFP贡献了20–25%。且近年来，中国的TFP走负，这意味着产出不及投入。不断提高的GDP因此不是在创造财富，而是在消耗财富。 从决定国力的三个方面 — — 区位、制度和人口，他认为美国仍是优势多于劣势。比如美国地理位置使其有着天然的军事缓冲带，同时也减少了防御周边国家的国防开支，而这是中、俄一笔庞大的成本；自然资源方面更是潜力巨大。人口结构方面，美国的优势甚至胜过印度。他同时指出了美国的不足，认为美国在政权能力（state capacity）（比如医疗开支等）方面要弱于德国和日本；另外是美国的基础教育差强人意。 Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Investor Sentiment and the Housing Market I've been spending some time studying the housing market and a number of companies that directly and indirectly do… basehitinvesting.com Stories of Fannie and Freddie. They have two businesses: 1. They collect a fee for guaranteeing mortgages 2. They earn a net int...