Food: Spring onion roll and shredded chicken
This week, my wife tries her hands at Chinese dishes. The spring onion roll was very spongy and not as salty as those we usually get in restaurants. The quantity of spring onions was just right – flavourful but not overpowering. Very hearty breakfast!
Love: Lives matter
The BLM protests across the US and other parts of the world seem so familiar: largely peaceful protestors on the one hand, and fully geared police and political leaders ever ready to resort to the use of force on the other.
What touched me was the varied ethnicity of the turnout. It seemed to me that people really get the point about “First they came …”.
A line that I thought could be interpreted in multiple ways was FT quoting a protestor saying, “I love New York City: people turn out when it comes to standing up for what’s right.” In the eyes of the protestors, what is right is to protect black lives, especially those underprivileged. In the eyes of the establishment and their supporters, protecting the lives of the privileged and their properties is also right. After the experience of the past year, I have even heard very educated and privileged people advocating that the biggest right is to ensure the continued stability, prosperity and progress of the nation. And that, this right trumps the right of the governed, who should expect to sacrifice small inconveniences such as truth and transparency in such a pursuit.
Historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote the following in Homo Deus, Chap 3 The Human Spark:
“The Romanian ex-communists and the Egyptian generals were not more intelligent or nimble-fingered than either the old dictators or the demonstrators in Bucharest and Cairo. Their advantage lay in flexible cooperation. They cooperated better than the crowds, and they were willing to show far more flexibility than the hidebound Ceausescu and Mubarak.”
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus, Chap 3 The Human Spark
As such, I am not optimistic that the outcome of a contest between the crowd and the elite would end up in favor of the crowd. Still, that does not mean some lives matter more than others, or that some abstract concepts trump human lives. The only thing within our control now is to act and let the people around us know that their lives matter.
Growth: The importance of asking questions
In one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes, George experimented with doing the exact opposite of what he would normally do as an unemployed bald man living with his parents. He ended up winning the heart of an attractive woman and a much-desired job with the Yankees.
This week, Khe Hy provided a link to Tim Ferris’ “17-Questions-That-Changed-My-Life”. The first question is “#1What if I did the opposite for 48 hours?”
Jacob Bronowski, who wrote the book and presented the BBC documentary The Ascent of Man, was quoted to have said: “That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.” Questions are even more important in life.
George couldn’t have read Tim’s list of questions, but he posed the same #1 question nevertheless. What is more, he experimented with it, and came off a better man, at least for a time. Unfortunately for the character, George reverted to his usual neurotic and lazy self soon after, most likely to keep the show going. For the rest of us, asking the right questions would be instrumental in not just keeping our life going, but making it great.
Investment: To hedge or not to hedge
Bill Ackman made headlines earlier this year turning US$27 million into US$2.6 billion using defensive hedges – that’s close to 100x return in 1 month.
The question on the minds of investors is – to what extent we should go to protect our portfolio. AQR did a study on this exact question. They concluded that using puts, even out of money ones, would be too costly over the long term. If you have some insight into market timing, as Ackman has demonstrated, and can enter short term hedges stretching out weeks or a few months or maybe even a year, you might still get a good outcome.
For the average retail investor, options would usually not be an option. However, the AQR article provided a few ways of hedging over the long-term without using costly derivatives. For example, the paper included the performance comparison of portfolios within subclasses of equities (defensive equities) and across asset classes (risk-parity) and also that of a hypothetical portfolio called Styles which focuses on four long/short alternative risk premia (value, momentum, carry, and defensive) and is applied across multiple liquid asset classes. Essentially, diversification is an investor’s best hedge over the long haul.
Awe: Another world?
Scientists at Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen found an exoplanet KOI-456.04 that orbits around a star Kepler-160 and does so at a star-planet distance that could permit planetary surface temperatures conducive to life. That is 1 out of more than 4,000 known exoplanets. Kepler-160 is 3,000 light-years (or 920 parsecs) from the solar system. Perhaps this might make it onto SpaceX agenda some time?
