Food: Missing tea-restaurants
My standard Saturday morning fare, at a local tea restaurant. The beverage is a local specialty call yun-yong, which rhymes with the Chinese names for the male and female mandarin ducks. It’s a mix of tea and coffee with evaporated milk. The food is instant noodles with beef in satay sauce with a pair of fried eggs in a tomato-based soup, with some ice-berg lettuce on the side.
Already starting to miss this.
Love: Wild Children
Popular Science summer issue is out, and they’ve made it free online. The article that caught my eye was “Let Children be a little Wild”. The argument was that unstructured and mostly unsupervised play fosters higher-level thinking skills and social skills.
This echoes the argument in How to Raise an Adult, that high-structured childhood correlates with less executive function capabilities and breeds orchids and teacups. The author cited the Swiss mindset, which drove a HR manager Suzanne Lucas to write “Why my child will be your child’s boss”.
It also reminds me of the movies Captain Fantastic and Leave No Trace. There are some very touching moments in these, especially for fathers.
I’m not sure if my wife and I are ready to put our daughter out into the woods, but we’re sending her on grocery trips semi-supervised. Hopefully a few more trips later she’ll be able to go unsupervised. And then more ventures.
Growth: Accidental icon
Another podcast I listen to is Adam Grant’s WorkLife podcast with TED. This week, I caught up on an episode saying career decline isn’t inevitable. One of the guests he featured was Lyn Slater, who became a fashion icon in social media in her 60s, while continuing to teach in university. I had problems loading her blog though, but am very impressed with her drive to keep living and learning new things, even from her own students.
Investment: Win some lose some
For each of the past weeks, I had put forward a thesis each week. I review two of these below: wheat prices and growth versus value versus bio-tech stocks.
Wheat prices has not done well compared to SPX. In fact, in the span of six weeks, it had under-performed SPX by 14% (SPX up 6%, Wheat down 8%).
As mentioned previously, the lifting of lockdown measures all over the world would prompt the recovery of dining out business, increasing wholesale demand. However, I expect price recovery to be weighed down by the unwinding of pantry loading over the past two months. I missed out on the timing – I had anticipated a longer period of lockdown than what is turning out to be the case. A bet worth losing.
Matthew’s effect continued mostly unabated over the past four weeks since I wrote about value versus growth versus bio-tech stocks. While the broader market represented by SPX increased 4%, value stocks’ increase lagged at 2% as represented by VONV, while growth stocks (VONG) continued to leap ahead by 7%. XBI, the bio-tech ETF, powered up 9% in the span of 4 weeks, after a 5% draw down initially.
Awe: Clash of the Galaxies
Over the past few weeks, I wrote about a star that oscillates around a black hole, dancing black holes, and two stars and a black hole that oscillate around each other. This week, European Southern Observatory released a picture about a pair of interacting galaxies known as Arp 271. The movie that came to my mind on seeing this image was that of Clash of the Titans, playing to Sarah Brightman’s A Question of Honour.
