Category Archives: Facebook

Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Facebook, Kindness, Music

[VIC – 155] Give me Libra, or give me death!

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Business & Money

In investing you often hear the disclaimer, “past performance does not guarantee future results.” And I get why it exists. You don’t people making investment decisions solely based on the fact that performance has been strong in the past, without considering any other factors.

But, in reality, past performance does often suggest that things will continue to be good in the future. I’m a big believer that winners usually keep winning. The best teams in sports usually keep winning. The best artists usually continue pumping out hits. The best VC firms get access to the best deals. And the best companies often continue to grow and take market share. In fact, the “momentum” investment strategy is centered around this core idea.

It’s not a complicated idea to understand. Great companies attract the best talent, hoards of capital, and organic attention in the media. The success feeds on itself.

So don’t let the disclaimer fool. I believe winners keep winning and I cherish opportunities to add to my winners. #BTFD

Human Progress

“Give me liberty, or give me death!”

These famous words were uttered by Patrick Henry in 1775 before the Second Virginia Convention. In doing so he was making an emboldened declaration that the United Colonies should be liberated from the Kingdom of Great Britain.

Well, asketh and thou shall receive! It would be under one year until the Declaration of Independence was signed in July of 1776.

I stand (well currently sitting) here some 243 years later and would like to make a similarly bold proclamation.

Give me Libra, or give me death!

Ok, it’s not my proclamation, but that of Mr. Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook). And call me dramatic, but we may be at the dawn of an equally historic moment.

A couple of weeks back, Facebook pulled the curtain back on its foray into the world of crypto and financial services. The company will be launching a new cryptocurrency called Libra. Well, more accurately, Facebook, in association with 28 other leading companies around the world, has created the Libra Association, which will be the governing body of the Libra cryptocurrency and the underlying blockchain with the same name. In other words, the digital currency will not be controlled by Facebook alone, but rather by the association.

Pulled directly from the white paper (I recommend reading the entire document),

The world truly needs a reliable digital currency and infrastructure that together can deliver on the promise of “the internet of money.” Securing your financial assets on your mobile device should be simple and intuitive. Moving money around globally should be as easy and cost-effective as — and even more safe and secure than — sending a text message or sharing a photo, no matter where you live, what you do, or how much you earn. New product innovation and additional entrants to the ecosystem will enable the lowering of barriers to access and cost of capital for everyone and facilitate frictionless payments for more people.

So why do I believe that this might be a historic moment? First, let’s zero in on the phrase, “the internet of money.” As a corollary, think about what the internet did for the flow of information. In the 90s, many referred to the internet as the “information superhighway.” That is, the flow of information was democratized. Given you had a computer and an internet connection, it became trivial to publish and distribute information. You could freely communicate with anyone across the globe within seconds. If the printing press wrested power from the church, the internet wrested the same from governments, media conglomerates, and incumbent power structures.

The key thing to note here is that there was a wholesale shift of control from those that controlled the supply and distribution of information, to those that controlled demand. So when I read the phrase “the internet of money,” the thought is that the internet should do for money exactly what it did for information. Namely, create a fully open and democratized system that empowers more people. But I don’t believe we’ve seen for money what we’ve seen for information.

The obvious place to start, and the first place crypto bugs often look for a use case, is the underbanked and disenfranchized. If you live in a setting that has poor payment infrastructure or is ripe with government corruption, an internet for money would be an obvious step forward. Similarly, any locale that is vulnerable to wild currency fluctuations would be an obvious beneficiary of an internet of money based on a stable digital currency.

However, while the above point is an important one, many in the west won’t care. One of the most common questions I hear people ask is, “Why would I care living in the US? We have great payment infrastructure and a stable currency.” True and true. But I’ll highlight a few examples of where there is still friction in the payment system. If you have family in one of those vulnerable locales I mentioned above, sending money to your relatives is far harder than it should be and carries high fees. Traveling is another friction point. Over the last few months, I’ve spent time in France, Korea, and Japan. I often couldn’t download a local ride-sharing app due to lack of a local bank account. Not all merchants accepted cards, so I was often forced to use the local currency. That brought with it ATM transaction fees and, of course, you get gouged in the airport on the way home when you want to convert back to USD. If you want to start a company, you might look for bank financing or venture capital, which is out of reach for many. So, while we do have it good here in the US, friction points abound.

The second point I’ll point to here is the formation of the Libra Association. Here’s a screenshot of the association members at this point (Facebook has stated a goal of at least 100 members when Libra launches next year):

Many thought that Facebook would try to launch a digital currency fully controlled by Facebook itself, but that wouldn’t make a ton of sense given a core tenant of blockchain technology is decentralized governance. However, with fully decentralized systems like the bitcoin blockchain, there are massive drawbacks in terms of efficiency and scalability. Bitcoin bears love pointing out the fact that it can only handle 7 transactions per second and that governance is a nightmare, leading to forks and slow iteration. But you might say this fact is as much a feature as a bug. When transactions need to be validated across a large number of decentralized nodes, you get slow throughput and wasted energy. The polar opposite of a blockchain is centralized database owned by 1 company. So you get perfect governance (a consensus of 1) and no scalability issues (think about how many events [posts, comments, etc.] are processed every second across Facebook’s family of apps today).

So, in effect, Libra sits in the middle of those extremes. It’s not fully decentralized given the association has a relatively limited number of members, but gains from the efficiency of having a more streamlined governance structure and being able to leverage the computing resources of leading global companies.

Finally, digital currencies today have a limit on adoption given how hard they are to use. Exchanges don’t support every currency. You can’t transact in many places. To put it simply, the user experience is shit. Facebook has the ability to change that in a massive way. If digital payments and financial services become easily available within Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram, you instantly enable billions of users across the globe to leverage Libra across a whole host if different use cases (P2P payments, e-commerce, etc).

And this brings me back to a point a made earlier. Above I said, “the key thing to note here is that there was a wholesale shift of control from those that controlled the supply and distribution of information, to those that controlled demand.” What I mean by controlling demand is controlling the relationship with the consumer. Facebook owns the relationship with all of its users, so publishers and advertisers must play by its rules. (the same is true for Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple)

With the association, Facebook has fully embraced that they will not be allowed to control the supply and/or distribution of a global digital currency. And they don’t need to. They are making a bet that they will be best positioned to control demand. That is, they will offer the best user experience and easiest on-ramps to using the currency.

243 years ago, we got the founding of what is now (arguably) the world’s leading global superpower and the dawn of a new era. And, I imagine that, if you could have asked people what they thought at the time, no one knew it. I wonder if we are witnessing something similar today.

Philosophy

A few weeks ago I visited the mountains of Pennsylvania for a friend’s birthday. On one particular day, our group was in the car headed to enjoy a few rounds of paintball. The cell coverage was spotty in the area due to the remote location. As a result, the GPS would often update on a delay while searching for a signal. So as we were nearing our destination, I missed a turn because there had been no instruction to do so. A few moments later, I heard the all too kind GPS lady say “recalcualting,” and we were back on track in short order.

I point this out because I love when technology provides a good model for behavior. These days, it’s common for people to complain about all of the downsides of technology. Loss of privacy, misinformation, etc etc. But sometimes, when you pay attention, you find hidden treasures.

What I love about the kind GPS lady is that she never gets angry. She has one goal and one goal only, to get you safely to your destination. If you miss a turn, she simply adjusts to the mistake and provides a new route.

What’s interesting here is that we often do the opposite with the people we love most. We become frustrated or short-tempered when they make a mistake, and quickly forget that we want nothing but the best for them.

I point this out because I’m as guilty as anyone of doing this. I do it with my grandmother. I do it with my wife. I do it my dog.

I think we would all be well served taking a page from the GPS lady’s book on how to treat people, especially those we care the most about.

My Latest Discovery

My friend David recently played this song for me. Have you ever been having a conversation, but suddenly you can no longer focus on the words swirling around you because the beat was too intoxicating? That’s what happened to me while this one was pulsing through the speakers. Do yourself a favor and give it a spin ASAP!

artificial intelligence, BTFD, Facebook, Investing

[VIC – 117] Buy the fu*!#$ dip

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Business & Money

BTFD, or “buy the fu*!#$ dip,” is a term used in investing when you buy a stock that has precipitously dropped in value, believing it will soon bounce back. I think it was coined by the team at StockTwits (Twitter for investors).

Take Facebook for example:

The stock fell off a cliff recently, falling 20% on the Cambridge Analytica news. That said, as I wrote in VIC 113, the business is stronger than ever (posting gangbuster growth, margin expansion, etc). So I bought the fu$!*#$ dip, and the stock has already recovered all of the losses.

Match Group (MTCH) is another BFTD I recently made.

It dropped 26% on the news that Facebook would be launching a competing dating product. I believe that to be a dramatic overreaction. Match owns Match.com, Tinder, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, BlackPeopleMeet, and a whole host of other demographically targeted dating services. From a technology perspective, they have a 23-year head start in online dating and their algorithms are trained for one thing, matching people (as opposed to surfacing content that drives engagement and feeds into confirmation bias). As such, I’d imagine it will take a long time for Facebook to get this right (they’ve tried before).

From the chart above, you can see the stock has already regained 17% of the losses and I’d say there’s more room to run. That is to say that, in the near-to-medium term, I don’t believe that Facebook poses a material threat.

Now Facebook is a fierce competitor (SnapChat currently in the crosshairs) so it would be foolish to write them off in the long term.

Yea yea I know, I always write on VIC about being a long-term buy-and-hold investor. But I also believe that you cannot hold beliefs so strongly as to miss out on fantastic short-term opportunities. And this feels like one to me. Time will tell.

Human Progress

Around 40 years ago, the Voyager spacecraft took off from Earth carrying a golden record. The record holds an amalgamation of artifacts representing life on earth. It contains hit songs, a recording of a kiss, greetings in 55 languages, a map of our interstellar position, a diagram of DNA, and many other things.

Everything about the golden record is mesmerizing.

Humanity is equally mesmerizing. You might think of your physical self as your window to the universe. Everything that you ever perceive is in relation to you.

It took 13.8 billion years for a group of atoms to come together to form your window to the universe. If you go all the way back to the beginning, you have this immense explosion of energy. That eventually leads to simple matter, and over time, you got increasing levels of complexity.

Then 4.5 billion years ago you get earth, and eventually microbes. Then you have perhaps the most important event in the history of life on earth, the merger of a bacteria and an archaea to form a eucaryote, which eventually leads to us (and the rest of the complex life forms we see today).

That picture and its sheer impossibility is astounding. And now we have spacecraft zooming through space some 13 billion miles away carrying all of our greatest discoveries and creations. And while the chance of the Golden Record being discovered by some other intelligent life form is some fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent, it’s no more or less likely than the probability that you are sitting there reading this newsletter.

It’s all simply amazing!

Philosophy

I briefly referenced the Church of AI in VIC 98. The tone was a bit facetious, but perhaps I should return to the subject from a more serious perspective.

Atheism is not a word I subscribe to. It feels a bit stubborn and dogmatic. That said, I don’t subscribe to any particular religion.

All the while, I work at a software company where machine learning lies at the core of everything we do. We use various ML techniques to model marketing/advertising data and surface insights therein.

ML is a set of techniques from within the larger field of AI. Today we have narrow AI that works well within specific domains. But the goal seems to be a more general purpose AI; one that will match the flexibility and plasticity of the human mind (and eventually surpass it).

Another way to say that would be to say that we’re trying to create life. And if we do that, one might say that we’re playing the celestial role of a “god.” And you don’t have to use words like faith and religion, but this seems to be a religious pursuit in everything, but name.

My Latest Discovery

While I’ve heard great things, I’ve yet to read Ray Dalio’s recent book Principles. But he’s done us a solid and distilled the 600-page book down into a mini-series of short videos totaling 30 minutes.

Definitely worth the watch!

Blockchain, Facebook, Investing

[VIC – 113] Long Facebook 📈. The internet is always about cats 😺. Pole dancing 🕺🏽. Honey 🍯 .

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Business & Money

Facebook is the 2nd largest position in my portfolio. And as such, I spend a lot of time thinking about it.

FB has been in the news a lot of late and, as a result of the negative press, the stock is down about 15% since it’s peak in February. The negative press centers on a recent revelation that Cambridge Analytica had gotten its hands on data related to about 50 million user profiles, and they subsequently used that data for targeting purposes during the 2016 elections.

The problem relates to a product offering called Facebook Connect, which I believe launched in 2012 and was shut down in 2015. The product allowed other app developers to use a “log in with Facebook” option within their own apps, allowing a faster signup/login process and also, more importantly, allowed those apps to collect user data related to that person and all of their connections on Facebook. FB was giving away a lot, but in return incentivized more developers to build apps on top of its platform. So, to put it simply, for a non-trivial amount of time, FB was being incredibly cavalier about user data and giving it away in droves. This didn’t come to an end until they realized that it was far more lucrative for them to focus on being a digital advertising behemoth as opposed to a platform for developers.
So yes, the above looks pretty bad and plays well into the Facebook undermining democracy narrative.

And while we’re at it, let’s add a couple extra points to the bear case.

FB recently experienced declines in active users within the younger demographic (though they saw growth overall).

There also seems to be more research surfacing every day about how there is an inverse correlation between happiness and time spent on social media platforms.

But, and a very big but, almost everything above is about perception and sentiment. If you flip to the numbers and the fundamentals of the business, it’s hard not to be a bull. The business has never been better.

You have accelerating return on equity over the last 5 years, largely due to constant margin expansion.

When looking at Q417, daily active users and monthly active users were both up 14% YOY.

And what’s interesting to me when I think about Facebook in my own life is that, despite the fact that their losing younger users in the US, it seems my aunts, uncles, and other family members are joining in increasing numbers and posting non stop.

It also allows me to be connected with anyone who has ever mattered in my life. I’m connected with a bunch of friends in Mexico due to an exchange program in 7th grade. I’m connected with my 5th grade math teacher. My dog Dutch was one in a litter of 7. I’m connected with the families who adopted his siblings. And without a phone number or email address, I can reach out to any of those people on a moments notice. Facebook has essentially become a utility.

So, all in all, nothing has changed about my investment thesis. I am long FB and will remain so (unless, of course, it crosses the stop I have in place at $140).

Human Progress

Back in 2010, Paul Graham wrote one of his famous essays called Organic Startup Ideas. In it he wrote,

Don’t be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that’s a good sign. That’s probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.

I’m thinking about this essay in relation to CryptoKitties, a platform that allows people to collect and breed digital cats on the blockchain. Now you’re probably thinking, “why the hell would anyone want to collect and breed digital cats?” Well maybe you’re smarter than I am, but that’s what I was thinking at first read. But this starts to get interesting when you really think about it.

First, we’ve all know collectors. Over the years, I’ve known people that collected beanie babies, stamps, coins, Magic The Gathering playing cards, Jordans, vinyl records, and many other things. For me, it was little model cars. My favorite was a red 1995 BMW Z3.

Whatever the item, it seems that it’s a fundamental human desire to own things that are rare and desirable by other people.

Second, it’s important to note that CryptoKitties runs on an open network with open standards (the ERC721 standard – a standard on the Ethereum Blockchain dedicated to the creation and exchange of non-fungible tokens). That means other developers can build their own digital assets and collectibles using the same standards.

Let me give an example that helps explain this second point. Today, you might be playing Grand Theft Auto (GTA) where you complete missions to buy things in the game (additional maps, guns, etc). But those digital assets are only valuable in GTA. If you switch over to World of Warcraft (WoW), those assets are nontransferable. But what if, instead of each game using proprietary standards to create their own digital assets, both used a set of common standards allowing assets to be transferable between games? Or what if you could sell those GTA maps and guns for Ethereum, then use that to purchase weapons in WoW.

Or think about Amazon and eBay. As a seller, you attain ratings and reviews over time as you sell more things. But there’s no way to transfer that reputation to another platform. What if the reviews and stars were a digital asset built on open standards that could be transferred to any other digital platform?

So, coming back to CryptoKitties, it’s likely that blockchain-based collectibles might be one of those things that initially gets dismissed as a toy (but not by Andreessen Horowitz and USV).

Philosophy

One day this week I was taking a ride on the 1 train. When I got on, there was this guy strangely rubbing his arm against the pole that’s supposed to be for balancing yourself while the train was in motion. I proceeded to walk to the other end of the car to give the crazy guy adequate space for his crazy antics. Once a safe distance away, I glanced back to see if the strange pole grinding was still taking place. At that point. I noticed something that I had originally missed. The guy only has one arm. From this angle, it became clear that he had some sort of itch or discomfort that, in the absence of a second arm, was incredibly difficult to reach. So he was forced to use the pole.

I wonder how many other moments exist where I jump to snap judgments without really understanding the situation at hand, how often I think one thing because I fail to pay close enough attention. It’s probably more often than I’d like it to be.

Still much work to be done on being present and aware of what’s real and true.

My Latest Discovery

Whenever shopping online, I used to check Retailmenot.com and/or coupons.com for discount codes before checking out. Luckily, that’s no longer necessary. If you download the chrome extension for Honey, it automatically applies discount codes across 20,000+ e-commerce sites as you shop so you don’t have to. They’re even integrated with Amazon so that, for any product, they are constantly checking to see if it might be on sale for cheaper from a different merchant. Go download it now!

Facebook, Pricing

[VIC – 104] Pricing power. Take control. Learning to unlearn. Zuck’s 2018 challenge.

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Business & Money

In business, there are basically two ways to increase revenues. You can raise prices or sell more volume.

It seems that selling more volume generally incurs an incremental cost/investment. If we’re talking about manufacturing, the machines need to stay on longer or you need to invest in better equipment. With services, you require more time and/or human capital. I guess the notable exception to this rule would be software and platforms where the idea is to drive marginal cost to 0.

On the pricing side, if you can manage it, raising prices seems to be the superior of the two options. If you can raise the price, and don’t suffer any loss in volume, revenue goes up without changing anything else. No incremental capital or cost required.

The archetypical example of this is Berkshire Hathaway’s acquisition of See’s Candies. When Buffett purchased the company in 1972, there were doing about 17 million pounds per year. A decade later, that total grew to 24 million pounds for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.5%. Nothing special. However, revenues grew from $31 million to $124 million over the same period for a CAGR of 15%! All they did, in spite of meager volume growth, was simply boost prices by 10% every year. And because See’s had built a strong brand, they didn’t suffer any loss in volume.

I’m thinking about this due to 2 contemporary examples of the same idea.

The first is Netflix. Over the last 4 years, we’ve seen pricing go from $7.99 per month to $13.99 per month for the premium tier. And we haven’t seen any negative impact on subscriber growth. Netflix has pricing power, so much so that I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see more price hikes. I won’t be canceling any time soon.

The second example is Amazon, who just last week boosted the monthly subscription price of its Prime service by 18% (the $99 annual subscription option remains unchanged). I don’t see this having any negative impact on the company, and again probably won’t be the last hike. If anyone has pricing Power, Amazon Prime definitely has it.

Human Progress

On Thursday, HuffPo announced that they’re shutting down their contributor network. I don’t even read HuffPo, but this news caught my attention nonetheless. Specifically, if you are a contributor (or were at any point), you are basically SOL.

I say that because, if you post exclusively on HuffPo, or any platform owned by a third party (Medium, LinkedIn, Forbes, etc), then you do not own your own destiny. You don’t own your content, your archives, your audience, or anything else. You are completely at the mercy of the platform. Incentives will never be aligned.

This is the primary reason that I now blog from my own domain using open source software on a shared server that I can move if I’d like to. It’s a bit more complicated than simply posting something on Medium, but the autonomy and agency is well worth the effort.

And this is part of a much larger storyline, one that centers around the battle between open and closed systems. The battle between the open source protocols from the early days of the internet and the closed centralized platforms of today’s internet giants.

The only way to chip away at that dominance is to start taking back control of ourselves.

Philosophy

I’ve written here many times about how much I value reading and continual learning. It appears, to me at least, that their benefits are self-evident.

However, the opposite is equally, if not more important. The capacity to unlearn or adapt in the face of new information is critical.

When I was in high school, my basketball coach told me that the form of my jump shot was all wrong and should be corrected. After a few weeks of practice and a few games where I couldn’t make a shot, I went back to the old form. I wasn’t willing to put in the hard work and deal with downsides of short-term frustration.

While I spend a good amount of time thinking about what subjects to go deeper on and what sources of information warrant my attention, I likely don’t spend enough time on the opposite. I plan to change that.

My Latest Discovery

Every year Mark Zuckerberg announces a personal challenge to learn something new. Here’s his challenge for 2018.

I’m not sure Facebook can be fixed because the necessary fixes would most likely run perpendicular to the core business model.
That said, Zuck has done a lot of things right and there’s a fair amount of evidence pointing to him being pretty competent, so I’m not sure I’d bet against him at this point.

Facebook, Investing, Social Media

[VIC – 80] Two horses 🐎 🐎 . Advanced trading for all. Not so fast 🏃. Shitty push notifications.

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Business & Money: two horses

Here’s a thought experiment:
You own two horses.
One is winning every race and seems to get stronger by the day. You were super lucky to acquire him via a deal with an old friend.
The second horse you have raised from a baby, but he’s very slow and always finishes near the back of the pack.
It’s important to note that horses are expensive and time-consuming to train and maintain.
Given limited time and financial resources, what do you do? Continue trying to train both, or let the slow one chill in a field with some yummy grass while pouring all of your time and energy into the fast one?
Ok, stupid question with an obvious answer. But in life, when emotions and egos are involved, sometimes things are less clear.
I say this because I’ve decided to spend a little less time thinking about what personal project I will work on next. Not because the entrepreneurial voice inside of me is any quieter of late, but because I’m already on a winning team. In the last 2 years at work, we’ve brought in an additional $32 million of capital, grown in size by 500%, closed a ton of deals, and established ourselves as a serious player in our market.
I hope that doesn’t sound pompous because that is the opposite of the point I’m trying to make. Rather, the point is that I believe my thinking has been a little off. The chances of success for a startup at our stage is 100,000,000% higher than trying to build something from scratch. So given my goals and limited time/resources, it makes far more sense right now to double down on the winner and save other opportunities for some time down the road.

Human Progress: advanced trading for all

Historically, advanced trading techniques have been reserved for sophisticated investors, money managers, and the like. But technology is changing that. Specifically, the team at Robinhood is doing great work to democratize investing for the average person.
They’ve recently launched Robinhood Gold which adds a number of advanced features. While trades will always be free, for a flat $10 per month you can get:
1) Trading on margin (margin works just like a credit card where you are buying something with borrowed money). Robinhood will lend you money to buy stocks. If you see an opportunity unfolding, but you don’t have extra cash in our account, you can trade on margin. And the great part is, anyone can sign up for Robinhood Gold for the same $10 per month regardless of the size of your account or your investing experience. With most traditional brokerages, applying for a margin account sucks. There’s usually a long application process which asks about your annual income, net worth, investing experience, and a bunch of other things. Like I said, it sucks. Of course, the amount you can borrow is proportional to your account balance.
2) Instant settlement – when you sell stocks or deposit cash into your account, you no longer have to wait for the funds to settle (~3 business days). You can trade immediately.
3) Extended hours – instead of only trading between the normal market hours of 9:30am – 4:00pm EST, you can now trade 9:00am – 6pm EST. This is great if you like to trade on special announcements and events like quarterly earnings. With earnings releases, which usually happen after market close, prices often move much more during after-hours than they do during the day. Now you can take advantage.
It’s really exciting when technology makes things accessible where they otherwise wouldn’t be.

Philosophy: not so fast

For every yin, there is a yang.

Just a moment ago I was celebrating the benefits of having a brokerage account in your pocket. And that is surely a good thing. But not ALL good.
If you think about the relentless progression of technology, the goal is always to make things easier. There was a time when you had to take a check to a bank to deposit it. Now you simply pull out your phone, snap a picture, and voila. Check deposited. Just get back from a trip? No longer do you have to drop the film off at the store, wait a few days, pick up the pictures, and mail them to loved ones. Just upload the photos to Facebook along the way and your friends and loved ones can experience everything with you as it happens.
In the aforementioned examples, easier is a good thing. I can’t think of a reason I would want to waste time and energy driving to a retail bank location or developing film.
But going back to a mobile brokerage, I’m not so sure. If you are just getting started with investing, the last thing you should be doing is trading in and out of positions on a regular basis. First off, it doesn’t make sense for tax purposes. You pay far higher taxes for short-term positions. Secondly, when access too easy, emotions will lead you to do stupid things. You’ll be inclined to sell stocks that are underperforming and buy more when you’re in the green. I’ve been guilty of both. Thirdly, you can’t do any real research in the app. Key statistics, ratios, earnings, research, financial statements, none of it is accessible. In other words, the app makes in incredibly easy to do all of the things you shouldn’t do while making it impossible to do the things you should do.
And you can’t even blame people for making bad decisions. We have all of these psychological bugs as human beings that so often lead us astray. A mobile brokerage provides an excellent opportunity for our fundamental limitations as humans to run amuck.
And you can see these examples all around us. Social media is probably the most obvious. You have all of these incredible benefits that the technology has bestowed upon us like constant connectivity to loved ones, excellent content discovery, etc. But there’s also this dark underbelly that facilities the spread of misinformation, harassment, privacy infringement, and a boat load of mindless time wasting.
We really need to figure out a better way to ensure that our technologies are being leveraged in ways that add optimal value while also protecting us against our own weaknesses as human beings.

My Latest Discovery: shitty push notifications

In my declining use of Facebook over the years, I’ve discovered just how psychologically nefarious that company is.
When I was a regular user, the push notifications were pretty relevant. So and so tagged me in a photo. So and so commented on my post. I had all of these ongoing conversations and threads related to how I was engaging on the platform.
Now that I rarely post (outside of giving you guys a heads up about new issues of VIC – I know, that’s pretty meta), the notifications are utterly ridiculous. Here’s a sampling from this week:
“Do you know so and so?” Why am I being notified with a question asking if I know a random person, with whom I happen to have 2 mutual connections?
“So and so is interested in an event near you.” Ugh, ok…
“So and so just posted for the first time in a long time.” IDGAF! I didn’t even engage with that person when I was a regular user.
“So and so commented on so and so’s photo.” Are you kidding me? I commented on a photo from an old friend last year, so now you will notify me when anyone else (regardless of if I know that person) comments on that photo?
The funny thing is, I think I have more notifications now then I did when I was opening the app all the time. They’re trying so hard to get me to waste time scrolling through my feed so they can sell my attention to advertisers. And once you log in, they’ve mastered the game of attention. You get mini hits of dopamine as you scroll through the endless vacation photos, baby pictures, and cat videos.
Lucky for me, given I own a chunk of FB stock, most don’t have the discipline to look away.