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Markets Summary – An Investor’s Digest for 29.11.2023

Lead Story in Markets: Clean-energy Sell-Off Defended by AES CEO

Andrés Gluski, CEO of US power group AES, has voiced concerns over the recent clean-energy sell-off, calling it “very wrong.” Gluski defended the company’s continued investment in renewables despite the market rout this year. As the push for sustainable energy intensifies globally, Gluski stands firm on the value of such investments, challenging the current market sentiment.

Chinese Business & Finance: Quant Hedge Funds Bet on China Amidst Investor ExodusRead More »Markets Summary – An Investor’s Digest for 29.11.2023

“The Politics Industry” by Katherine Gehl & Michael Porter – A Harvard Business Review Press Book Essentials

The Politics Industry

A HBR Press books essentials by doitinvest.com

That politics are important – no one doubts it anymore. That it is an industry, with vision + mission + strategy – only two brilliant academics as Gehl and Porter could so boldly state. Published during the pandemic of 2020, “The Politics Industry” attempts to break the by-partisan lock in the American politics and foster innovation.

Wait a minute you could say? Why do we need innovation in a system that it is broken? We need to first fix the political system, right? Or?

Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter argue otherwise. Firstly, the US political system works as is designed to. The problem here is the design – its duopoly appearance leads actually to unhealthy internal competition and dismal marginal returns. The players are jostling for one camp or another, ignoring alternatives (including methods) which might actually radically improve the returns for the ordinary citizens. The results are visible since decades – no voice outside the duopoly system can make itself hear, whilst when the political ideas are shaped in a Republican or Democrat form, they loose substance. Read More »“The Politics Industry” by Katherine Gehl & Michael Porter – A Harvard Business Review Press Book Essentials

Advanced Analytics (1) – Mind the Date… Format (in Power BI)

You load the data in Power BI, visualize it and… it looks wrong. Instead of the European Day-Month-Year format, you get the funny-looking US Month-Day-Year one. Or the other way around.

Even worse, when you try to summarize the January sales, you get 12 months instead.

Intelifly.com took the challenge and looked at this issue. They prepared a demo on how to import and present the dates, no matter what the source format looks like. Our Intelifly partners specialize in finding advanced solutions to your data challenges, mostly by using Microsoft’s Power BI analytics software. If you are curious about what can be achieved, have a look at the free demos available on intelifly.com – the COVID pandemic evolution (tracked daily) and the Wiener Boerse status (Vienna Stock Exchange).

To better explain what is going on, we have prepared several steps:

 

1. Input tables

There are 3 tables available in Microsoft Excel, showing 3 dates formats:

  • an US-formatted dates table (i.e. MM-DD-YYYY style),
  • an European-formatted dates table (i.e. DD-MM-YYYY style) and
  • an unformatted dates table – where I specifically formatted the dates as Text and forced them to the dubious General format (which is a way of MS Excel saying “I don’t know what you want from me”).

Read More »Advanced Analytics (1) – Mind the Date… Format (in Power BI)

“Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos”, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson – a HBR Book Essentials Review

The latest Harvard Business Press title represents a compilation of public statements, articles and written thoughts – all belonging to Jeff Bezos. “Invent and Wander” has thus two main important functions:

1. It sheds a light on the principles and processes under which Jeff Bezos built Amazon from an online book 📚 retailer to the largest e-commerce retailer in the world.

2. It offers a historical perspective on the development (or if you want – becoming) of a top business creator, who always dared to be different.

Add to the above Bezos’s idiosyncrasies on:

– building the most possible customer-centric company and

– surrounding himself with trusted persons and leaving them to do the job whilst he sits back 

and you will have on your ✋ s som thing of a an advanced business cookbook.which would be the envy of the 19th century oil barons.

“Invent and Wander” starts big and ends… literally flying in space. The beginning theme focuses on the long term perspective. Amazon never did anything for the the next 3 months – it always looked at the next 10 years. This is the main reason why the company went public only 3 years after its start, despite its exponential growth in a hot 🔥 sector (founded in 1994, IPO in 1997). This is also why Bezos insisted that they never pay any dividends, but rather to reinvest the money in new projects. In a sense, Jeff Bezos is a brilliant financial architect – as one of the most coon-held view among the hedge funds is that companies are sums of projects with a finite lifetime, rather than production machines. Read More »“Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos”, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson – a HBR Book Essentials Review

“Think for Yourself – Restoring Common Sense in the Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence“ by Vikram Manshamarani – A HBR Press Book Review

Think for yourself, use properly the props of experts and artificial intelligence! But wait a minute, isn’t an expert AI supposed to help us take better decisions? As another famous HBR Press title states, “Prediction Machines” should augment our processes and help us get better products.
Well, not so quickly. In his new book, Vikram Mansharamani takes a closer look at how we abandon ourselves to the AI systems. And for good reasons – both the above mentioned titles issue a stark warning with regards to the current state of machine learning. We are in an age of great machine learning developments. And the name of this age is still infancy, therefore users beware – things have a long way to go before they get better.
Here both “Prediction Machines” and “Think for Yourself” converge on the antidote to th orchestrated jumping in. Users who led augment the AI with their own experience – after all, the human brain is likely the most advanced processing mainframe on Earth. It does not matter really how many lines of code or how many programmers worked on it – take a break, take a deep breath and think: “What is this AI product output trying to sell me?”.
As usually in our HBR books reviews on doitinvest.com, I would like to expand on a chapter I liked very much. For me, this was “Unintended blowback” – with some interesting medical cases and their impact on our lives. (This links well with the personal experiences of most friends and acquaintances). Medical science is well advanced on its way, but still has miles to go. For example rare diseases – there are too few doctors specialized in them and too few research was spent on it. As a consequence, most diagnostics for rare diseases are delivered on a qualifying manner – i.e. with a disclaimer at the end. The issues start app waring when doctors over or under interpret the diagnostics of such a rare disease. It is a bit like over or under-reacting to a serious circumstance. Read More »“Think for Yourself – Restoring Common Sense in the Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence“ by Vikram Manshamarani – A HBR Press Book Review

Looking for a new job in Vienna/Austria? Please train our speech bots!

Recently I applied for several roles advertised online by various recruiting companies Acting in Europe. From one (Austrian Vienna-based) recruiting firm (let’s call it “HRBerater”) I did not receive anything back – except a first time automated email fired to all of the rejected candidates. When I applied for other 2 positions, no other reply (email or phone).
As any newbee (or soul returning) to the jobs market, I was devastated. I thought (wrongly of course) that my profile was so bad, that nobody from HRBerater even bothered to look at my CV again. Or give me any kind of feedback.
Then, one recent cold January evening, my heart was again beating faster. I received an email from them! An email! I dropped what I was doing and opened it. The unexpected email looked as below:Read More »Looking for a new job in Vienna/Austria? Please train our speech bots!