Shawn Burns is Solve the Riddle

   REVIEW OF THINKING IN BETS—Annie Duke This work builds off Tetlock’s “Superforecasting” and Kahneman's “Thinking Fast and Slow” but is much more digestible and anecdotal.  As well as attempting to give workable solutions to these issues. (IMO). The aim is to improve decision-making through objectivity, accuracy and open-mindedness. Error one: Resulting - people mix up the best decisions with the best outcomes. Opens up cognitive traps like mistaking correlation with causation or cherry-picking data to support our narrative. Incomplete information gives rise to a challenge when attempting to learn from past decisions. Best decisions are the result of a good process and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our state of knowledge which is usually a variation of “Im not sure”. The accuracy of guesses is dependent on the information you have and how experienced you are at making such guesses. When we think in advance about the chances o...

 PFIZER $28 Uncertainty breeds opportunity in equities. That is clear, the issue being is the uncertainty so large as to make sensible analysis near impossible and look like a pure speculative bet which it often becomes in these cases. For PFE I am putting this down as a record of my thoughts so that in future I can conclude what went right or wrong. There are many issues here, the main ports of call obsolescence and debt need to be looked at. Stock-specific issues abound here as well. One by one. Debt is high but no higher around $19b than the previous 10 years so it's not great but nothing out of the ordinary. Obsolescence is an ongoing issue for pharma, they need to reinvent themselves over time and a long period of drug failure would not be well received and potentially company-threatening. PFE has some $20B (est) coming off patent in a few years. They will lose revenues how much. C19 revenues are now down to $14b and will probably fall further but most the damage...

 The 1999 movie “the Insider” tells the story of a tobacco executive whose conscience becomes too much and feels obliged to disclose the harm done by tobacco products but is hamstrung by the confidentiality agreement (CA) with his employer, Big Tobacco that protects the firm. It's a great movie with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino. I cant actually recall seeing it when it came out, it's not surprising at that stage of my life. The movie got me thinking about CA’s in general. On the surface, they seem quite innocuous. Maybe protect the firms IP or a client list etc. Then again how do they relate to my industry, funds management. Unless you have developed a smart algorithm there is not too much original IP in the industry that has any longer term value. The dynamic nature of markets make current assessments quickly out of date. The DDM and DCF models were invented decades ago! Client lists? The Australian market is quite small and is vehemently guarded by consultant gatekeepers who...

  The Re-emergence of the Fed put 15/12/23 If we go back to late 2020 or early 2021, it is now quite apparent that central banks made a sizeable error by keeping monetary policy too lax for too long. That opened the door for the demon inflation to emerge. During this period, I have contended that an error was made but we did not know what price we have to pay for that error. The bull scenario was a muddle through with inflation getting back into the box with a strong monetary response but not one strong enough to strangle the economy. The bear case was that the economy would be strangled as much tighter conditions were required. As an aside it is not good enough, imo, to just say we will have a recession, as those of us that have been through a few will attest it quickly becomes an assessment of what type of recession we are actually in, a “technical” recession, ie very soft, or a market clearing, gut wrenching recession, or any of the thousand variants in between. As you can e...

 Any information on this blog is not advice. Information is of a general nature only and does not take into account your individual circumstances so can't be relied upon by you. Do your own research. These are only my views and opinions and may contain factual errors.