The last time I found a book explaining the workings of a stock exchange was literally called The Work of the Stock Exchange, describing the New York Stock Exchange in 1922. Confusion of Confusions is a bit older. 234 years older. Published in 1688, describing the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. One might assume that the first-ever stock exchange back in the 17th Century would be lacking most of the...
I fell into another nostalgic computing rabbit hole, this one a few years later, looking at how the Xerox STAR and Apple Lisa could have succeeded, wildly, bringing the graphical computing era forward by almost a decade. That story begins with an earthquake, a few months before Apple’s IPO. A quake that puts the company’s existence in peril and ends up waking up Xerox to the...
A talk by Richard Hamming. Bellcore, 7 March, 1986 Transcript I have given a talk with this title many times, and it turns out from discussions after the talk I could have just as well have called it “You and Your Engineering Career,” or even “You and Your Career.” But I left the word “research” in the title because that is what I have most studied. From the previous chapters, you have an...
Why does Africa lag behind the rest of the world as measured by economic development? Why didn’t Africa follow along with the growth of the Asian Tigers, China, India, and Southeast Asia? What was missing? Joe Studwell gives a plausible explanation in his new book, How Africa Works. TL;DR, the answer is population density. That isn’t a factor that I had ever considered, as Africa...
This blog has been quieter than normal as I started blogging on whatifonly.substack.com about a year ago. There are over 100 posts over there to read. The most popular topics and posts: INVESTING S&P 6 > S&P 494 S&P500 < Africa Better than PE, VC, and S&P 500 Returns ECONOMICS & Business Gold Accounting ≠ Truth How to create a tax base On a Daily Basis? The Valuation...
Hi, I’m Luni. I’ve been entrepreneuring for the last 35 years. Software companies for the first 20 years, one at a time. The first funded by my leftover college fund, then a super-Angel. The next four by California-based venture capital funds. Only the first shut down. The acquired. One big win. In 2011, while running my last software company, I stumbled upon Bainbridge Graduate Institute, the...
Have you ever noticed that if something is older than your grandparents, it feels like it has been around forever? So much of modern infrastructure and modern conveniences fall into that pattern. Things we take so much for granted that no one bothers to question where they came from. Especially boring bits of infrastructure, like buses. The Tim Traveler has this answer, and hundreds more videos...
For institutions whose ages are measured in centuries, the day-to-day inner workings of the stock exchanges are amazingly undocumented. I’ve asked numerous traders and others in the capital markets, and they all tell me they learned those details “on the job” from their peers. Almost a year ago I found The Work of the Stock Exchange, which did document quite a bit of the...
Back in 2019 I posted What is Money?, and it included a link to Perry Merhling’s course on Coursera. I had originally found his lectures on YouTube, which were at some point taken down. Today I found them, edited into two 6-hour pieces:
I found these from today’s’ post on substack, The Hierarchy of Money. If you like my writing, subscribe to that feed.
If I had to boil down my lessons for entrepreneurs on how to deal with investors, it boils down to “put your self in their shoes.” What does the investor want from you in order to decide to invest? What does the investors want from you after making the investment? For debt investments, the lender gave you money. That loan came with money and a schedule for repayments. What does the lender want...
