🧬 ISSUE No. 8 – Sep 18, 2024

💰 Finance, 6'5'', blue eyes - How does the finance sector ($667 trillion) worth more than the total value of all the economic activity in the world ($105 trillion) | 📝 Keep Rewriting Your Mission Statement

ISSUE No. 8 – Sep 18, 2024

Hey there,

We are finally here in this pumpkin spice peppermint mocha season 🍂🍁!

I hope you all enjoy a nice hot drink today.

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Sometimes, we are too naive to assume that finance is just about borrowing and lending—the opposite is true. So, before we continue our weekly ritual, let’s step back and understand what finance is and the gist of it. We will visit an article in the London Review of Books published on September 14, 2024 - trust me, you will be amazed.

In this issue, we will discuss the finance industry, why there is always one loser for one winner in finance, how the finance industry creates almost no value for humanity (with an example of a mango 🥭 crate, and, lastly, why we should keep rewriting our mission statement.

Not sure what this newsletter is about? Read the very first post here.

London Review of Books: For Every Winner a Loser by John Lanchester

Books Reviewed

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates and the Unravelling of a Wall Street Legend 
by Rob Copeland.
Macmillan, 352 pp., £22, August, 978 1 5290 7560 1

The Trading Game: A Confession 
by Gary Stevenson.
Allen Lane, 432 pp., £25, March, 978 0 241 63660 2

Let’s begin with a nice paragraph in the review.

The total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion. That’s the mangoes. The value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity – that’s the subsequent trading – is $667 trillion. That makes it the biggest business in the world. And in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. It does nothing and adds no value. It is just one speculator betting against another and for every winner, on every single transaction, there is an exactly equivalent loser.

I’ve been struck by an idea that challenges conventional thinking: value creation might not be the North Star in the finance industry. It’s often just a zero-sum game—where one person’s gain is another’s loss. Compare this with science and technology, where discoveries produce a positive sum: think about vaccines or antibiotics that have saved countless lives. The impact of these advancements is clear and measurable. Yet, finance, a sector ($667 trillion) that’s worth more than the total value of all the economic activity in the world ($105 trillion), feels out of sync with this value creation narrative.

It makes me wonder: what kind of society are we incentivizing? Are we building a system where value is created or just shifting numbers on a balance sheet?

Before I send you to the review site, here are a few more paragraphs quoted from the review.

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Banking is not about lending and borrowing.

In his indispensable guide to the current condition of the financial industry, Other People’s Money, published in 2015, John Kay talks about the state of the UKbanking sector, whose assets then were about £7 trillion, four times the aggregate income of everyone in the country. But the assets of British banks ‘mostly consist of claims on other banks. Their liabilities are mainly obligations to other financial institutions. Lending to firms and individuals engaged in the production of goods and services – which most people would imagine was the principal business of a bank – amounts to about 3 per cent of that total.’

Proof of no value was created throughout the finance process:

Lending money where it’s needed is what the modern form of finance, for the most part, does not do. What modern finance does, for the most part, is gamble. It speculates on the movements of prices and makes bets on their direction.

Here’s a way to think about it: you live in a community that is entirely self-sufficient but produces one cash crop a year, consisting of a hundred crates of mangoes.

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1. In advance of the harvest, because it’s helpful for you to get the money now and not later, you sell the future ownership of the mango crop to a broker, for a dollar a crate.

2. The broker immediately sells the rights to the crop to a dealer who’s heard a rumour that thanks to bad weather mangoes are going to be scarce and therefore extra valuable, so he pays $1.10 a crate.

3. A speculator on international commodity markets hears about the rumour and buys the future crop from him for $1.20.

4. A specialist ‘momentum trader’, who picks up trends in markets and bets on their continuation (yes, they do exist), comes in and buys the mangoes for $1.30.

5. A specialist contrarian trader (they exist too) picks up on the trend in prices, concludes that it’s unsustainable and short-sells the mangoes for $1.20.

6. Other market participants pick up on the short-selling and bid the prices back down to $1.10 and then to $1.

7. A further speculator hears that the weather this growing season is now predicted to be very favourable for mangoes, so the crop will be particularly abundant, and further shorts the price to 90 cents, at which point the original broker re-enters the market and buys back the mangoes, which causes their price to return to $1.

8. At which point the mangoes are harvested and shipped off the island and sold on the retail market, where an actual customer buys the mangoes, say for $1.10 a crate.

Notice that the final transaction is the only one in which a real exchange takes place. You grew the mangoes and the customer bought them. Everything else was finance – speculation on the movement of prices. In between the time when they were your mangoes and the time when they became the customer’s mangoes, there were nine transactions. All of them amounted to a zero-sum activity. Some people made money and some lost it, and all of that cancelled out. No value was created in the process.

Read more about this amazing book review here.

II. What never changes - timeless wisdom

 📝 Keep Rewriting Your Mission Statement

It is super important to get this right: your mission statement — why are you doing what you are currently doing? The actual reason behind your every day life. Maybe you are working a super boring 9-5 day job, but you are actually saving up for your next trip or next business venture. That gives the boring day job an actual meaning and turn the whole thing as a journey, the every day step as a footprint towards the North Star.

Recently, I listened back to one of the classics written by Mr. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, on my Audible. Super, super soul-shocking when I was listening to the part about rewriting your mission statement from time to time. Do I have a mission statement? For my business, yes. For my life, yes. But as days go by, the mission statements get covered up by dust. Here are my real examples.

In 2018, I started my first legit business. Not a side gig, or side hustle, but a full-time battle of my dream against reality. Every day, I watched the clock ticking, and no sales happened. I watched the clock for as long as I was awake every single day. I tried this and that approach. I built this funnel, that social media channel, and tried tons of software that had tons of testimonials. Since I had literally zero sales after I started my business for days and weeks, I had so much time to think. I constantly think about the “why” behind the courage to start a business from scratch and alone.

Oh, so it was because of my personal experience as an international student studying abroad, and I wanted to provide the most personalized study abroad consulting to my students. That was such a great and shining mission statement for that moment. As time went by, the company grew to about ten employees. People come and go. New product ideas pop up here and there. The original mission statement still feels valid, but it contains that dated sense as in a young Pinot noir.

Continue reading here

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Let’s have a break…

Bruce Levin is the scientist behind YESCARTA, the first FDA-approved CAR-T Cell Therapy product in 2017. If you have him on the scientific advisory board (SAB) of your biotech startup, you will surely raise millions of dollars.

To praise and glorify him, let’s see one of his posts on X this week.

If you are an AI enthusiast, you better know the father of it, Yann LeCun.

III. Book Quotes

Here are some book quotes for you to ponder over the weekend.

Thanks for reading,

— Anthony

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