A true mashup - MMM #11

Hi there,

I’ve had a busy week so, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to produce any of my own content this week. This also marks the first week without (something close to) a central theme but I think that’ll make it even more interesting.

📃 In today’s mashup:

Have a great week!

I’ve long been skeptical about cryptocurrency and anything closely related to it. Don’t get me wrong, the tech is definitely cool and has its uses, but the idea that a decentralized system could store value, without any government interference is wishful thinking to me. As Benjamin Franklin once said: “the only two certainties in life are death and taxes”.

For serious “stores of value” the fluctuation in the price of crypto is just too large. Besides: is there any “real” value to crypto (other than as a speculative asset)? But hey, why sit here and read my arguments if you can watch this excellent documentary by Folding Ideas, clearly laying out why what we’re seeing is a good old bubble.

A great piece of data visualization that I came across this week is this: an overview of Europe and its different treaty groups, truly stunning.

We all like to think that we are the objective ones, but this new paper by Marc Broekema shows two interesting experiments in Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) context. Both relate to the “objective” valuation of a firm’s value. He shows the impact on firm value of behavioral biases such as the “anchoring bias” (an initial number is taken as a goal) and “engagement bias” (your client’s interests). It is always interesting to see the difference between buy- and sell-side valuations and the article illustrates this nicely. Have a read if you’re interested :)

I have seen many questions pop up about the impact of the war in Ukraine on global markets. Here is a comprehensive 20-minute overview by Prof. Damodaran (my favorite source).

Continuing the topic, a piece of advice from Warren Buffett. Don’t hold cash. With fears of stagflation (stagnation/recession + inflation) on the rise, we may soon find ourselves in rainy weather economically. Although holding stocks also comes with (massive) risks, you’re at least not holding paper of zero intrinsic value.

I always enjoy deep dives into niche topics. One of those is the origin of a certain song. I recently came across this relatively small channel that started producing very high-quality documentaries only recently. Given the state of Youtube copyright enforcement, it might surprise you that the subject of those documentaries is: music!

You’ve probably heard this hit in the early 2000s so if you’re into tracking samples across songs, unknown producers, who stole what from whom, etc., watch this great piece of content.

Next week I hope to have some content for you. It has been a difficult balancing-act and will take some time to get right but I am confident that I can get a schedule down eventually :)

Have a great week!