Weekend Reading #103
Photo by Jason Wong on Unsplash
This is the hundred-and-third weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 30th January 2021.
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What we're doing.
Excitingly, this week we launched a new website for our private market deals plaform, 3BC . Until now, we’ve been housing 3BC's offering as a subsection of the website for the parent company, Three Body Capital. This has worked well for our initial period of growth, but we always knew there would come a time when 3BC needed to break out, build a standalone site and cultivate a brand and identity of its own.
Well, that time has come, and this week we pushed the new website live, creating a space where 3BC can truly sell its offering. This means clearly setting out how 3BC helps three client types, issuers (those raising), investors (those investing) and affiliates (those bringing issuers and investors to 3BC). It also makes a platform where we can publish views on the world of private markets and a channel to speak directly to new and existing 3BC users.
We want the new website to transmit 3BC’s core message – that 3BC is here to help bridge the gap between all participants in private markets, creating a unique, cost-efficient and safe place for doing business. We’re quite proud of the website and we hope you like it too.
We’d love to hear any feedback or thoughts that you may have on the new site, so please have a look at http://threebodyconnect.com/ and let us know what you think.
What we're thinking.
While all the action this week has been focused on stocks and the Battle of Wall Street which we address somewhat in our blogpost, the world of crypto has continued to blaze ahead. With Bitcoin and Ethereum being the primary vehicles for mainstream attention, the spectacular run in DeFi right now is still mostly a secret outside of the crypto world. But this is where all the excitement is and so it should be. We wrote some months ago about what we see to be a revolutionary moment for DeFi as many protocols began to show rapid adoption albeit still inside the world of crypto. Leading projects such as Aave (lending), Synthetix (synthetic instruments) and Uniswap (decentralised exchange) have surged into crypto’s top twenty by market capitalisation. All of these platforms operate on the Ethereum blockchain whose activity and hence fees have also surged in recent weeks.
The entire premise of Decentralised Finance is its permissionslessness - no single operator can control the network. In light of the blanket shutdowns we have seen this week from Robin Hood et al, one cannot help but think that with a group of young, tech native investors ripe for the picking, the “unshutdownability” of these platforms will be very appealing. We are so incredibly early in DeFi and volatility persists but the direction of travel is pretty clear.
What we're reading.
Palantir is a company which has attracted much controversy over the years, however since its IPO last year its stock price has exploded upwards. Whatever your view may be, you cannot deny the genius of what has been built. This article from Wired magazine highlights Palantir’s role in using its software to track, monitor and identify potential insurgent activity through pattern analysis of a target’s daily habits. The article is an excerpt from a book called First Platoon by Annie Jacobsen. It covers the life and death decisions that need to be made by one man when relying on Palantir’s technology and the consequences of the machines getting it wrong. An eye-opening read.
A fine book (which is actually more like a long essay) we read over the last week was History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America by political scientist, Bruno Macaes. It’s been especially prescient to read during a time of such great tumult in America. In the UK we have been glued to our televisions and Twitter feeds throughout January as the last throes of the Trump presidency played out. Given what’s happened, it’s impossible to know what happens next, but Macaes’ account of where America is headed is an optimistic one.
Macaes’s argument flies in the face of many critics who argue that the US’ inexorable rise over the past two centuries has stalled and is now, seemingly, in some sort of decline. But is this correct? Great civilizations in history have always lasted longer than 200 years, and the problem with trial by media, social media, rolling news and the like, is that seemingly significant events in politics and economics might be constantly blown beyond proportion, when in fact they are of no greater importance than a minor correction on America’s path to continued growth, prosperity and global domination. Of course, China might have something to say about the global domination part, but critics calling “game over” on the American experiment because a left-field (or right-field, rather) candidate ended up in the White House might have spoken too soon. At least, that’s what Macaes thinks.
In his short book, Macaes offers a compelling and revisionist vision of America's future that is both exciting and unnerving. Looking to history, Macaes argues that from the early American Republic to present, America has been borrowing and mirroring the best parts from other global democracies and it is only now, in the 21st century beginning, to find its own path. Trump was just the most recent step along this path, and Macaes is confident that the America that emerges will be stronger than ever before. According to Macaes, America is only just getting started.
This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the country that, from a blank slate a mere 250 years ago, invented itself — and went on to create so much of the modern world. Who knows what they’ll create in the next 250?
What we're watching.
This week, we sat down and watched the recently released Wonder Woman sequel, WW84, and frankly were rather disappointed. Whilst Gal Gadot is undoubtably a great actress and a real stunner to behold, the plot of the movie seemed shallow and without giving away too many spoilers the ending was rather anti-climactic. However, after recently binging season 2 of The Mandalorian, hearing Pedro Pascal again in a non-Star Wars context and this time without sporting his famous Mando helmet, admittedly felt strange. Nevertheless, the first film of the Wonder Woman series is an exciting action thriller set on the Western Front in 1918 and could be well worth a re-watch in the weeks to come.
Netflix has been on a tear with non-English content, and their latest production, Lupin dans l’ombre d’Arsène, is the perfect centrepiece for an evening unwind. Centred around the exploits of the main character Assane Diop, who has taken his inspiration from Maurice Leblanc’s famous (fictional) “Gentleman Burglar” Arsène Lupin, France’s corollary to Sherlock Holmes, the first few episodes tell a tale of ingenuity and brilliance. It remains to be seen if “dans l’ombre d’Arsène” (“in the shadow of Arsène”) is a harbinger of anything more sombre than its literal meaning, but so far, 5 episodes in (at the end of Part 1), it’s been an absolute joy. Part 2 is due in a couple of months and it’d be interesting to see how the writers further develop the plot. We have also fallen into the rabbit hole that is Call my agent on Netflix, and enjoyed the amazing The White Tiger.
What we're listening to.
This interview of famous macro investor, Paul Singer, by Grant Williams is well worth a listen. Many of the macro themes floating around are discussed particularly the influence of central banks and what the end game will be.
We’ve previously recommended in this newsletter Matthew McConaughey’s memoir, Greenlights. It’s superb and very different to most other autobiographies you might have read. As McConaughey says on the book’s opening page: “This is not a traditional memoir … this is a playbook based on the adventure in my life.” And the podcast we listened to this week wasn’t a traditional podcast, either.
Following on from that written adventure is a podcast from Google Talks with McConaughey which is a fantastic listen and builds on many of the themes and stories in the book. Of course, the focus of the talk is on those “greenlights” – the imaginary traffic signals that he’s run into in his life during times when he must make a key decision and he gets the impulse that he absolutely must go for it.
As you can imagine, it’s a fun, informative, inspiring listen, mainly due to McConaughey’s charisma and manner on stage. There’s just something magnetic about the man and the stories he tells... which is why he’s one of the world’s highest paid film stars!