Weekend Reading #66

Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash

This is the sixty-sixth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 2nd May 2020. To receive a copy each week directly into your inbox, sign up here.

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What we're doing.

Our Three Body Emerging Opportunities Fund is up and running and this week we placed our first few trades. All we can say is how great it is to be officially running money again.

We’ve also been working hard with issuers and investors, onboarding them onto 3BC, our private deals platform. As you might expect, we’re seeing lots of activity on the issuer side, with a broad range of innovative companies keen to explore raising capital via our platform. It’s been great fun talking to these companies and getting to grips with the challenges that they’re facing right now. We’re looking forward to setting them up with a deal listing on 3BC and, subject to a couple of last minute product fixes, we can’t wait to push the 3BC product to a wider community of investors. 

Launching a fund, trading platform and private markets deal platform whilst a global pandemic rages around us has not been without its unique and significant challenges. But it’s been great to find out what a team can still achieve whilst sitting apart in home offices, kitchens and bedrooms. Technology has made work and collaboration possible, but good humour coupled with some grit play their part too. Our pace of progress hasn’t slowed. If anything, it’s increased. 

What we're thinking.

Readers of this newsletter will know our views on the potential of Bitcoin and digital assets in general. This week saw a monumental rally led by Bitcoin. As we often say in public markets – things tend to happen slowly at first and then suddenly all at once. This rally is no exception. 

As we all know, it is a very young asset class with many non-believers from traditional asset markets, yet this is slowly changing. The volatility is inherent given the early stage nature but it remains fascinating to be part of the journey.

What we're reading.

In lockdown, we’re reading a lot. 

Fiction and nonfiction, books and news, longform, tweet-storms and everything in between, for education and pleasure, work and play. 

Reading has always been a cornerstone for how we invest and the way we form our view of the world. But this extraordinary period, where we’ve all been confined to our homes, has offered us a chance to focus even more than usual on written content. 

With this on our minds, a quote from Naval Ravikant caught our eye: 

"The smarter you get, the slower you read."

Our online and offline worlds are awash with the written word. As a result, the volume that we feel we need to read to stay informed means reading fast. Twitter feeds and rolling news are designed to constantly present us with something that seems important. And if you were to read everything on offer slowly and deliberately, you’d get little else done. Hence, speed is of the essence. In fact, some see speed reading as a badge of honour. 

But Ravikant’s use of smarter could be understood as smart people recognising how they don’t need to read everything. Far from it. Rather, they set up systems (curated feeds, selective sources, accept recommendations from only a few) which present them with less to read and, hence, give them more time in which to do it. So, the smarter you get, the more time you have to read.

This brings to mind an idea from Nassim Taleb’s book “Antifragile” (also referenced liberally in this week’s blog post), where he recommends that you choose what you should read according to the Lindy Effect. Time acts as a natural filter, thus, if a book is still in print after 100 or even 1000 years, it is likely to be of more value than a book printed this year. 

Ravikant and Taleb are building towards a similar heuristic, one that encourages us to be more deliberate when we choose what to read and how we read it. In a world where the news cycle is lightning fast and our attention spans are dwindling by the day, this can be hard. But a more considered approach to reading will pay dividends.

Indeed, the same problem can be found in other areas of our lives. Selecting something to watch in a hurry or ‘binge watching’ a series makes television thin and unfulfilling. Grabbing and wolfing a quick lunch on the go likely means the choice of food is rushed and its hurried consumption far from ideal for our bodies and minds.

Being more thoughtful and deliberate with our daily diet of content, entertainment and food can make us smarter, happier and healthier, and that’s an approach worth contemplating, especially in lockdown. 

As we’ve been forced to dial down the pace of our lives, many people will have gone further, either consciously or subconsciously, and recalibrated how they spend their time. In refocusing on the things that truly matter, being ‘present’ feels less like a cliché. When the range of options is limited, it’s an opportunity to slow down and start valuing the elements of life that are truly meaningful and important. 

Perhaps this is a lesson we can learn from lockdown and a practise we can use when these strange times are little more than a memory. An update to Ravikant’s wise words could be: 

“The smarter you get, the slower you live.”

Continuing this theme of deliberateness, here are a few carefully selected reading recommendations. 

Everyone will be familiar with Edwin Lefèvre’s classic about the life of the boy plunger, Jesse Livermore, one of the great traders of all time entitled Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. We’ve read that one multiple times before but this week we blitzed through a book written by the man himself which was written in 1940 and called simply, How To Trade In Stocks. In it, Livermore details his investment process and some of his personal anecdotes on markets. We highly recommend it.

If you’re searching for some fiction, look no further than two books by Irish author, Sebastian Barry. Days Without End and the recently released sequel, A Thousand Moons, are stunning and a welcome departure from so much of the content that we consume on a daily basis. 

The two books go hand-in-hand, as A Thousand Moons reunites us with soldiers, Thomas McNulty and John Cole, our heroes from Days Without End. A Thousand Moons is narrated by their adopted daughter, Winona, who tells the tale of an extraordinary life as a Native American orphan. Both books are set against the backdrop of the American Indian wars and civil war in the mid-1800s and are stylistically particular and jarring in prose, language and format. Cormac McCarthy fans will engage with Barry’s style. 

Where Barry bests the great McCarthy is in his prose, which is savagely descriptive and unflinching when tackling cruelty and violence. However, Barry manages to always retain a mythical, fairy-tale-like air that allows you to believe what you’re reading might just all be a bad dream for the soldiers and Native Americans. Whilst a work of fiction, you’re painfully aware that Barry’s stories are likely true reflections of real people who lived through these times, reminding us that whilst reading of harrowing events such as these can be difficult, it feels important to bear witness, too. 

Proof that worthwhile content can be deliberately discovered from many sources was offered up this week by a superb Twitter thread from the super-smart Jawad Mian. It drew on Greek mythology to make the point about the unerring ability of the vast majority of speculators to incorrectly predict the future. 

Mian tells the story of Apollo’s muse, Cassandra, who “has become the archetype for many prophetic characters who are either ignored or cannot be comprehended until after an unfortunate event has occurred.” 

As markets swing wildly around us, we’re constantly reminded that there are a great number of ‘experts’ out there, especially in finance, desperately trying to sell us their personal version of reality. To quote Mian, “In a world full of ambiguity, we see what we want to see.” 

Everyone has their own version of the future and, to bolster their cause, they desperately want to make it your version of reality, too. The final tweet in the thread is one we wholeheartedly agree with, especially in uncertain times such as these: 

“What should be important is that we are agnostic in our analysis, rather than ideological; and empirical, rather than dogmatic.”

What we're watching.

Sports documentaries can be hit and miss. However, with live sport off the air for the foreseeable future, documentaries are one way to access the sporting buzz again. The investment being made by the big content creators into these productions shows that they believe in this format, too. 

Two great documentaries came to our attention this week, with Amazon Prime’s The Test, charting the Australian cricket team’s battle back to the top of the world rankings in the aftermath of the infamous sandpaper/ball-tampering scandal that rocked the entire sport and the Australian nation. 

Even if you’re not a cricket fan, the level of access Amazon gained (paid for?) gives the viewer an incredible insight into what it’s like to be a top level player or coach, and the excitement that you vicariously experience during the tensest moments of last summer’s Ashes battle forces you to precariously perch on the edge of your seat. In the absence of live action to shout at, The Test gets the adrenaline pumping.

Given the popularity of sports documentaries, every sport and team, from rock climbing to competitive cheerleading to Sunderland FC, seems to have been given a series by one of the big streaming services. And rightly so, as there is entertainment to be found in each. But what can not be in doubt is that a series which focuses on Michael Jordan, one of the most influential athletes of all time, was always going to be great. And it is. 

ESPN and Netflix’s 10-part epic, The Last Dance, takes us into the beating heart of the locker room and charts the rise to the summit of the sporting mountain by the troubled, combustible genius, Michael ‘Air’ Jordan. Sure, there are plenty of epic plays, gravity-defying dunks and weirdness and hairstyles from Dennis Rodman, but what gives the show its edge is the insight you get into Jordan’s upbringing, temper and divisive personality. We knew the man was a nightmare to play against… but it sounds like he was even worse to play alongside. 

This is nothing new. We’ve all read about the faults and flaws of Woods, Armstrong, Tyson, Agassi… But we’ve never seen them this close up and in this much detail. 

What we're listening to.

Fans of 80s/early 90s music may have seen there is a new Beastie Boys biopic documentary on Apple+ which will be well worth a watch. But before its arrival, be sure to download the Beastie Boys’ “Beastie Boys Book” that tells the story of their rise to stardom in their own truly creative and utterly idiosyncratic style. 

This is like no audiobook you’ve ever heard. If you’ve listened to any of the Beastie’s music, you know how good these guys are at telling stories. So their autobiography was always going to be packed with awesome tales from their time growing into the biggest band on the planet. 

The audiobook, however, is so different and, we believe, a work of genius, because Mike Diamond and Adam Horovitz (two band members) are joined by an All Star cast including Snoop Dogg, Steve Buscemi, Jon Stewart, Bette Midler, Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller who each take turns to read a chapter from book, putting their own spin on what the band meant and still means to them. 

So, if you’ve got nothing else to do for 13 hours this weekend (we’re in lockdown, of course you haven’t), download, sit back and enjoy.