Writing
Starving at Four Thousand Calories
Two charts crossed my desk this month. One shows the price-to-sales ratio of the S&P 500 at 3.59, the highest reading in the eighty years of data behind it. The other shows M2 money supply at $23.1 trillion, up nearly…
Economic Obesity: When Monetary Abundance Creates Real Starvation
The Parallel Pattern Obesity is a profound paradox: the body experiences starvation while consuming thousands of excess calories. The mechanism is disrupted sensing. Processed foods alter intestinal stem cells, shifting…
A Game-Changer in ED Therapy: Rapid-Onset Nasal Spray
LTR Pharma Ltd (LTR) is an Australian biotech company developing in a novel nasal spray to treat erectile dysfunction (ED). I interviewed the company’s CEO – see below. Lead Indication LTR’s lead indication is the…
Update on ProKidney
I met with Nikhil Pereira-Kamath, Chief Business Officer, another of ProKidney’s (PROK) recent hires, last week via Zoom to get a sense of where things stand. I have previously described PROK as a compelling biotech…
Leap Therapeutics Inc
LPTX is a clinical-stage immuno-oncology biotech. Their clinical programs primarily focus on inhibiting the Wnt signaling pathway and targeting Claudin18.2, both of which play crucial roles in cancer development and…
Checkpoint Therapeutics Inc
Checkpoint Therapeutics Inc (CKPT) is on the cusp of becoming a significant player in the rapidly expanding immunotherapy market. Its lead candidate, cosibelimab, is a potential best-in-class anti-PD-L1 antibody, with…
Mama Creation’s Inc
Mama’s Creations, Inc (MAMA) is a micro-cap consumer staples company transitioning from a deep value stage to a growth stage with a new management team, significant industry tailwinds and demonstrated capacity to…
Bard: Tell Me How Important Copper Is To Rio Tinto’s Future Revenues
I submitted this question to Bard’s (Google’s AI tool) on June 30, 2023 and am publishing the response without edits. “Copper is a very important metal for Rio Tinto’s future revenues. In 2022, copper was the smallest…
Battery Innovation and Enovix Corp
Enovix Corp (ENVX) is innovating in consumer electronics batteries with a 100% silicon anode technology that greatly increases energy density while solving the thermal runway problem that has been a persistent risk with…
Two Ideas Emerge In The Banking Crisis
It appears the acute phase of recent bank failures is over. Now comes the chronic phase when bank margins get squeezed. Regional banks in particular will struggle to sort out hundreds of billions in poor performing…
ProKidney
Founded in 2015, PROK is developing a novel therapy to improve or reverse decline in kidney function without the need for immune suppressive agents. The company’s lead product candidate, REACT, for which it has…
Investing In Greta’s Game Of Russian Roulette
There no greater sign of humanity’s trouble with energy than the current war zone surrounding the active Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (the largest nuclear power plant in Europe) in a country, though rich in…
Profire
De-globalization and misguided ESG narratives that served short-term political utility have created conditions for oil to rise to new, inflation-adjusted highs. The only remedy to reconcile rising demand is a massive…
Piedmont Lithium
In a prior post , I laid out a general thesis for lithium and discussed Piedmont Lithium (PLL) among some other publicly-traded companies that might be appropriate for speculative investors. In this post, I will examine…
Energy: A Different Kind Of Transition
For energy investors, the current situation is ideal: an industry virtually guaranteeing higher prices by being unprepared to respond to higher prices – and a Western society unable to deal with various hypocrisies that…
How Technology Is Driving Lithium Demand And Supply
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Lithium, the earth’s least dense and most electrically-conductive metal, is in the grips of a chemical reaction with Elon Musk who ignited a major consumer shift toward…
Screening Synthetic Biology Companies
I asked a person on my team at SC Capital to help me explore an idea using his background as a PhD in economics and statistics. After a lengthy discussion about biological data sets that have the quality of non-mean…
Using Language In Portfolio Construction
The references to my writing in this post are meant to show how language can be a tool to compose narratives about individual stocks in the discovery and selection stage of portfolio construction. My goal with language…
A Serendipitous Discovery Is At The Heart Of SQZ Biotech
SQZ Biotech IPO’d in November with a $350 million+/- market cap on the basis of a new technology called Cell Squeeze®. What we can observe about this company in the present is limited to a very short history and is…
Back in the USSR
In my early career, I went straight from graduate school (developing country economics) to the frontier economies that had just been scattered like coins tossed in a desert after the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the…
Biometry Emerges As The Driver Behind Your Emerging Personal Area Network
COVID-19’s shock has accelerated technology adoption on a new, steeper curve. There is also a tangible sense of a vacuum in Federal crisis management leadership that simultaneously touched everyone’s personal health.…
Here’s An Example Of Extraordinary Value In The Wreckage Of Panic Selling
Here is a moment in time that illustrates what can happen in a panic. A severe dislocation played out this week in the mortgage REIT space. NY Mortgage Trust’s 7.875% Series E Fixed-to-Floating Rate Cumulative…
Evaluating Enterprise Cloud Stocks Through A Thematic Growth Lens
Despite generally meeting and raising revenue and customer growth projections in the most recent quarter ending June 30, 2019, many enterprise cloud computing stocks have been hit with a severe drawdown in September as…
This High Quality Midstream Energy Company Hits Muti-Year Low
MPLX LP is an investment grade mid-stream energy company that has sold off amid a lot of upstream E&P stress. This toll collector provides the vital infrastructure for the transport of oil and gas from remote locations…
These Two Junk Food Companies Point To A Major Healthcare Opportunity
One barometer of the future state of health for the average American is food consumption today – or, more precisely, the composition of processed foods in total diets. I define processed foods, or junk foods, as high in…
Here Is The Only Public Company With Direct Exposure To The RPA Industry
Blue Prism PLC (“BP”) is among three leaders in an emerging robotics process automation (RPA) niche industry that, along with other more mature SaaS/Cloud enterprise software firms, is pioneering the “re-platforming” of…
Facebook’s Conduct Shows Not All Network Effect Are Positive
Network effects are a much-cited economic construct applied to market concentration and increasing returns for strategies pursued by some leading tech companies. This dynamic economic agent is also known as demand side…
A Note On The Music Industry
The music industry turned the corner in 2015 when streaming revenue gathered enough steam to reverse a 15-year decline in sales. Now firmly on the other side of that trough, things have changed. Music discovery has…
Why US Political Risk Should Be A Factor In Portfolio Risk Budgets
The events leading up to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008/2009 did not fit the data. Patterns based on historical precedent failed to contemplate an outcome so different from expectations: that the crisis would be the…
The Emerging Robotics Process Automation (RPA) Industry
Back office accounting, billing and customer service is going robotic. Examples of this trend towards hyper business workflow automation include turning paperwork into electronic records, automatically updating payment…
Musk Brings Enormity Back To The Speculative Genre
Elon Musk’s Tesla, Inc probably could not have happened without the monetary corruption of various forms in the last 10 years, but it did, and while there are many zombie companies floating around today based solely on…
Intrexon: A Case Study in How to Invest Like a VC
Among the seemingly endless stream of startup advice, there is little or no consideration for the opportunity to put startup investing ideas to work in the stock market using some of the well-known tools employed by a…
Two Perspectives on Food Innovation: SodaStream vs. Monster Beverage
Spending on Food and Drink. Source: Economist Food and beverage spending in the US is the lowest in the world as a percent of total household spending. Such a statistic could be considered an achievement if it weren’t…
PepsiCo Mexico
The Economist Obesity Rates in Selected Countries It is becoming widely known that the United States is the fattest country in the world. Within one generation, our population’s body mass index (BMI) shows that those of…
Suncor Energy By The Numbers
In the late 1990s, I started my career as an oil and gas banker. At that time, the best place for an ambitious 20-something to get a lot of high level exposure to big oil and gas transactions was in the wide open…