AKG weekend Bulletin #111 - Meta Myths, Taleb writing, Covid Wuhan Origins & SRK interviews

A compilation of few interesting, multi-disciplinary links from the internet

“To be a successful distressed-debt investor, you have to be unemotional and contrarian, because your job is to buy at the height of fear and panic. My antennae are always up and on the lookout for those times when fear and panic are present. It’s almost always the optimal time to buy, and those are the periods I enjoy the most—deploying capital when I sense few other investors are buying and most are selling.” —Bruce Karsh (via the book How to Invest)

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What to Do When You Know What Stocks Will Do Next - by Jason Zweig [LINK]

Self-control is a key to investing success, but so is fending off self-delusion. Beliefs that had come to feel like eternal truths—inflation is dead, interest rates will stay lower for longer, there is no alternative to stocks, giant technology companies will never let investors down, and so on—have been blowing up in people’s faces.

The Myths of Meta aka Facebook [LINK]

There are still plenty of ads on Facebook, and mostly not from traditional advertisers from the analog world: entire industries have developed online over the last fifteen years in particular, built for a reality where the entire world as addressable market makes niche products viable in a way they never were previously — as long as the seller can find a customer. Meta is still the best option for that sort of top-of-the-funnel advertising, which is why the company still took in $27 billion in advertising last quarter.

How I write - by Nassim Nicholas Taleb [LINK]

If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the comtemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.

Cumulative vs. Cyclical Knowledge - by Morgan Housel [LINK]

Cyclical knowledge, and the inability to fully learn from others’ past experiences, means you have to accept a level of volatility and fragility not found in other fields. I can imagine a world in 50 years where things like cancer and heart disease are either non-existent or effectively controlled. I cannot ever imagine a world where economic volatility is tamed and people stop making financial decisions they eventually regret – no matter how much history of past mistakes we have to study.

COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab [LINK]

The Wuhan lab at the center of suspicions about the pandemic’s onset was far more troubled than known, documents unearthed by a Senate team reveal. Tracing the evidence, Vanity Fair and ProPublica give the clearest view yet of a biocomplex in crisis.

SRK and the fine art of winning interviews [LINK]

​Thread : India's first Paralympic gold medallist Murlikant Petkar [LINK}

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That's it for me. Have a great weekend ahead!

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