Duration is a fundamental financial concept, but it’s more part of the fixed income investor toolkit than the equity investors’. For reasons I’ll get into, duration is usually a misleading concept for equity investors, but there are a few cases where that’s changing.
Duration in bond investing refers to two…
Aside from religion and politics, it’s hard to think of another topic in recent memory that has provoked more fierce debate than the concept of remote work. For years, “future of work” enthusiasts would quibble over how some people are more productive by cutting out commutes and working in a…
More than six months after the World Health Organization first declared Covid-19 a pandemic, airlines are barely limping along. The TSA’s daily passenger count tracker currently shows that air travel is down about a staggering 70% from last year. Demand for air travel is better than it was during the…
The Covid-19 crisis shifted a large portion of American retail online virtually overnight, but the gradual post-pandemic reopening has led to an interesting second shift: Online payment companies have started moving offline. Last month, CVS Pharmacy announced plans to add PayPal and Venmo QR code payments in its 8,200 stores…
Economics nerds always complain that you should never compare stocks to flows. It’s meaningless to say that one company’s cash on hand is bigger than a country’s GDP, for example, because GDP is quoted in dollars per year and cash on hand is a cumulative quantity. It’s like saying a…
It was a little over a month after the NBA season and NCAA tournament had been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. Spring training had been delayed, and the entire 2020 Major League Baseball season was in jeopardy. Despite all this, fantasy sports giant DraftKings went public in late April…
It’s always tempting to invent an elaborate story for why a particular investment is brilliant, why a trend is about to start (or reverse!), or why some incredible, sweeping change will alter the world and make savvy investors a profit.
But there’s an easier place to start, which is to…
When Uber’s board of directors searched for a new CEO to replace Travis Kalanick during the summer of 2017, they landed on Dara Khosrowshahi, an investment banker-turned internet dealmaker. Khosrowshahi had spent nearly two decades of his career working at online travel giant Expedia and before that at IAC, a…
Special purpose acquisition companies (or SPACs) have raised record amounts in the last few years. Some 28 SPACs have had IPOs this year, raising $8.9 billion, according to SPACData.com. At the current rate, that’s on pace to reach $16.5 billion by the end of the year, beating last year’s $13.6…
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I write about technology (more logos than techne) and economics. Newsletter: https://diff.substack.com/
