Business & Money

Netflix is an incredible company. I don’t spend much time in front of the TV these days, but when I do, Netflix is often what I’m using. From an equity perspective, the stock has also been good to me. Very good.
BUT.
I sold my entire position this week. Let me explain why.
In 2007, Abbey (the UK’s 2nd largest mortgage lender) increased the amount that it was willing to lend homeowners to 5X their annual salary. The historical benchmark was 3.5X.
Just this past June, Argentina issued $2.75 billion of century bonds at an interest rate of 8%. And this was just as it was coming out of default. Actually, Argentina has defaulted on its debt 5 times in the last century, and 8 times in the last 2 centuries. What’s more, this most recent bond issue was heavily oversubscribed.
I point out these 2 examples because we are in the “this time is different” phase of the current bull market. People are forgetting what happens when debt markets get frothy. And right now, the froth is so deep you can swim in it.
To bring it back to Netflix, they’ve just announced a new (junk) bond issue to raise $1.6 billion to fuel its content spending machine (planning to spend $7 – $8 billion on content next year). COUGH COUGH. Please excuse me, I was chocking on the froth for a moment.
And the new debt sits on top many other concerning facts. The company burns cash faster than a California wildfire and has had negative free cash flow forever. The cost per subscriber is climbing faster than the revenue per subscriber. If there’s one company that might overcome all of this, it’s Netflix. But I’m not willing to make that bet, especially in this market climate.
It’s possible that we have a ways to go in this bull market. And perhaps I will miss out on a solid portion of the upside for Netflix in the near term. But those that rise the highest during bull markets will fall the farthest in bear markets. And that is exacerbated when you have shaky fundamentals.
And don’t forget, there’s nothing stopping me from getting back in when things come back down to earth.
I’ll remind you, THIS TIME IS NOT DIFFERENT!

Human Progress

Amazon has made nearly $470 billion in revenues over the last 5 years. They’ve paid $2.4 billion in corporate income taxes over the same period. That doesn’t seem right.
Bezos and his executive team are getting incredibly rich, they’re creating a ton of shareholder value, but it seems society should see some of this value creation. We have public schools, infrastructure, social security, and many other things that we’ve agreed as a population are important.
Amazon has been making incredible progress over the years in cloud computing, automation, machine learning, and e-commerce. But their business model has also revealed a glaring lack of progress in how we look at corporate income tax. It doesn’t seem right that you can run a business at break even and avoid paying taxes, while also enjoying cheap access to capital like it has never been seen before.
And I’m not at all proposing that there exists an easy solution. But I think we need to start getting creative and trying new things. Perhaps businesses above a certain market cap could be taxed based on a percentage of revenues. Perhaps that percentage could change based on industry and/or fixed vs variable cost structures. Perhaps taxation could show up higher on the income statement before R&D expenses are taken out.
Who knows.
But I do believe that there are tons of people way smarter than I am that could spend a bit more time with this one.

Philosophy

I came upon a quote this week that read “great musicians know when they are out of tune. Poor musicians do not.” To use different language, I read it as “it’s easy for smart people to say ‘I don’t know.’ Stupid people think they know everything.”
I once read an article from Albert Einstein from the time when he was first formulating his ideas that would lead to the birth of quantum theory. The article begins,
“It seems to me that the observations associated with blackbody radiation, fluorescence, the production of cathode rays by ultraviolet light, and other related phenomena connected with the emission or transformation of light are more readily understood if one assumes that the energy of light is discontinuously distributed in space.”
I love the way that it begins with “it seems to me.” Here is one of the most brilliant minds to ever grace the earth stumbling upon one of THE transformative ideas in modern science, and he hesitates with the humility that only a great man can have.
I think this happens because the more one reads and learns about the world, the more apparent it becomes how little we actually know and understand about how things work.
Further, there’s this concept in science known as an “effective theory”. That is, a theory that applies in practice and is observable in everyday life. Since we’ve mentioned quantum theory, we can stay on this subject. Before quantum theory, Newton’s laws were the end-all-be-all in terms of describing the motion of objects. But if you zoom in enough, these laws will start to break down, and quantum mechanics takes over. That, however, doesn’t make Newton’s laws any less true. These laws make up an “effective theory” in that they work well to describe reality with regards to human experience. Quantum mechanics is simply more fundamental, more granular if you will.
Personally, I believe it makes sense to approach everything I know as an effective theory. Here is what I’ve learned and here is how it applies. But, at some future juncture, it’s likely that I’ll learn a new piece of information or idea that allows for a more precise understanding of how things work. And that new knowledge will allow me to go beyond my previous limitations, and thus should be welcomed when it arrives.

My Latest Discovery

Apple AirPods are incredible for so many reasons.
First off, no more dealing with a tangled cord after retrieving them from my backpack.
Second, the pairing with my watch, phone, and computer are seamless. I no longer have to pair and un-pair multiple times per day.
Third, the AirPods themselves hold a great charge and, given you toss them in the case when you’re not using them, they’re constantly being recharged (though constant charging is generally not great for long-term battery life, so we’ll see where this one nets out).
With AirPods, you can really start to see a future where you don’t need to bring a phone every time you leave the house.