Eric Janszen’s recent article notes the serial bubbles that have occurred since the 90’s, and predicts that the only viable candidate for the next bubble is alternative energy.
The argument that there will be another bubble seems pretty strong; but to me, the reasoning around how and why “the bubble cycle has replaced the business […]
Again via Steve Hsu, a thought-provoking article on how to make easy money running a hedge fund.
The basic idea is that a fund manager has a good shot at generating outsized returns over a limited time period by selling insurance against a low-probability event. The reason for the high return is the low but significant […]
Supplemented by Steve Hsu, a rant on how few people get the training to really understand distributions, which are increasingly important in everyday life.
This reminds me of my foray into tagging, where I had to dust off my own understanding of distributions. On the one hand, the fact is that the topic can just be […]
This is old news, but somehow I’d never come across this particular chart before. In a white paper on solar power, I came across the following graphic:
This sheds new light on the stats regularly circulated about the growth of Internet advertising as a whole. Apparently, a fixed pot of money has just been getting re-allocated […]
I noticed that I keep having the same conversation with people on fundraising. Understanding how ownership changes when a company raises money by issuing stock really is simple and straightforward. I think I’ve pinned down at least one issue that might make this stuff seem more complicated than it is.
The issue is that entrepreneurs […]
Kevin Burton points out that given current ad monetization capabilities, CraigsList is leaving millions on the table every year. And Kevin says that it’s “evil” to do so, since that money could be given to charity.
I can see his reasoning: a way to do good is to make tons of money and give it away […]
A recent Business Week cover story points out that despite recent massive profits at big oil companies, their future ability to meet world demand is uncertain at best. A big reason why is that more and more reserves are under nationalized control:
In the 1960s, 85% of known reserves worldwide were fully open to the international […]
Recently I keep seeing variations of the same theme pop up around the web: that in a complicated world, we have to try to simplify things by using easily stated and compared measures; but that these same measures tend to distort things, since they sometimes become more important than the reality they purport to […]
The mentions of “Vickrey auctions” I recently came across via various posts led me to this paper. It’s a really interesting analysis concerning how bidding works on search engines like Google and Yahoo, and how advertisers are not necessarily being as well-served as they could be. It also clarifies what “Vickrey” means, and how it […]
In a previous post I tried to describe an economic shift that I think is helping to support a new environment less tolerant of the monopoly power inherent in private enterprise platform determination:
The liquidity in the maturing online advertising industry, which allows new applications to monetize utility to users quickly and directly.
In other words, […]