“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts
It's probably even more than that with the "Buyer's Premium" tacked on - the Christie's cost calculator linked reckons that would be another EUR540,000 on top...
AIS is an aide to navigational safety, but cannot and is not relied upon as a sole source of data. Not every vessel is required to have it, or have redundant systems for it.
As this article suggests it's not verifiable information and can be spoofed in various ways, or just switched off if you're up to no good. Various international bodies are keen to come up with standards to reduce the opportunity for spoofing AIS, but it will likely not go anywhere.
The Project Sandstone series from RUSI digs into various techniques smugglers and sanctions busters use to hide or mask illicit activity at sea.
It's in the early days but this is exactly what Architecture the Hard Parts[0] is working on: finding for each system the right balance between pulling things apart and putting them back together again.
This article explicitly goes down the "micro" in microservices route, which does have the problems you identify. There's an alternative school of thought that regrets, or at least downplays the obsession with "micro". Much of the drive to microservices was a reaction against things like the Enterprise Service Bus in the SOA world becoming the big ball of mud no-one can easily change - SOA and microservices don't have to look a world apart.
I'm a big fan of Mark Richards and Neal Ford's emphasis of architecture being about trade-offs. No one thing is a silver bullet.
What I call a Service Oriented Architecture is much like the Microservice architecture but without worrying about the "micro" aspect.
Typical architecture in our projects:
- User Management Service with ORY[1]
- Payment Service with Stripe[2]
- Hasura[3] for the storage layer
- GraphQL backend querying the above services
- Frontend querying the GraphQL backend
Basically, we tend to delegate the boilerplate to third-parties (self-hosted whenever it's possible) and only implement the business logic ourselves.
Rural poverty is a real thing, and often overlooked by politics / media / society. Rural villages no longer tend to have a shop or post office, the bus services can be erratic and infrequent, it's a real problem.
The student rental market 12 or so years ago was definitely full of horror stories about getting deposits returned, knowing which letting agents to go with useful insider knowledge. The Scottish deposit security scheme is only a few years old and has definitely helped improve the situation. The rental market is one in which there can be significant power/information imbalances and where some protections make absolute sense.
Student and tourism rentals are worse than the regular rental market because 9x/10 the people getting screwed out of their deposit can afford it so there's less latent "it might actually be worth someone's time to sue you" to keep the landlords in check.
I live in Edinburgh, one of the more car-unfriendly cities in the UK and recently bought a Model 3. I park on the street, the city has gone nowhere with its plans to provide on street chargers.
Yet it isn't a problem, despite a relative lack of public chargers compared to elsewhere in the country it is still perfectly feasible. I've tweaked my habits to go to the supermarket that has a charger in the car park, when planning what to do at the weekend I check nearby charging locations.
Business locations can acquire visitors by offering them, and there's all sorts of upsell benefits. A garden centre that has one might get me to stay and visit their cafe if I know I'm going to be there for an hour for instance.
Is this strategy still going to work if everyone is doing the same thing?
My local supermarket has a couple of electric car charging points, amongst perhaps 200+ car parking spaces. On a busy saturday most of those spaces are full.
Certainly it's possible to install a charging point at every parking space, but it requires both a large scale building project to lay all those wires (the existing charge points are right by the supermarket - where the power is already available), and also potentially an upgrade to the local power network.
If each of those cars is fast charging at 50 kW, the supermarket carpark will suddenly be consuming 10 MW. Assuming a constant cycle of people, that's equivalent to the average power usage of 20,000 houses.
Just in one supermarket car park.
Fortunately it's unlikely everyone will charge every time they pop in, but it's something that has to be considered carefully. The electric grid has to be sized for peak load - most of the time it's not near capacity. If we're going to slot electric cars into the existing grid we have to manage demand very carefully - which means only charging cars when electricity supply is high or demand is low. Everyone rapid charging whenever they feel like it (eg during the Saturday shop) will cause huge stability issues.
The most straightforward way to manage it is to try to get as many cars as possible charging overnight (or charging whenever they're idle) and then manage when they actually draw power centrally based on electricity supply. That means extensive kerb side charging points.
How do these public charging stations work in terms of payment? Do you have to activate it using a credit/debit card first and then just leave it plugged in?
The supermarket ones are free - though only 7kW, as they're for customer use. I park up and go for a walk round the local park then do my shopping.
For the rest I use Charge Place Scotland - it's a scheme where you pay £20 a year and get free unlimited charging at various locations around Scotland, they do have some separate locations you have to pay, usually for faster charging. Certainly amongst my friends with electric vehicles it's a point of pride to never pay for charging beyond that £20.
We haven't looked into the logistics of supporting Oracle yet. The fact that Oracle is closed source makes everything a little bit harder. This was our experience when adding MsSQL Server support.
Feel free to get in touch if you would like to discuss more about your use case :)
It's more complicated than that - as the article says PE can be used to diversify an investments. If you have a few extra billion you might not want to tie it all to the performance of the US equity market. So PE doesn't have to beat the S&P to be attractive if the ups and downs happen at different times to the S&P.
Then there is also the question of fees, if the fund is beating the S&P by 1-2% after fees, and their fees are 2 and 20 then the strategy is significantly beating the market. The problem is that there is so much money chasing PE, and that leverage means they don't need that much in client funds, that there isn't a push to lower fees that you see in the equity market.
> "If you have a few extra billion you might not want to tie it all to the performance of the US equity market."
Yes, but... Vanguard's S&P 500 fund isn't the only index fund on the planet, either. You can include a broad international fund, a region or country-specific fund, or any other number of factors. Diversification and passivity are orthogonal.
> "if the fund is beating the S&P by 1-2% after fees"
Yes, but:
1. You're taking on a higher degree of risk, because the information available to you is much more opaque and unregulated (e.g. EBITA as a valuation metric, when it's so easy manipulated). Bubbles are hard to time, even when you do have decent data available. But investors in that world are just completely flying blind. And historically received only a small net premium for that additional risk.
2. Even that historical premium seems to be gone now. As I pointed out from the article, that "1-2%" is looking back over a quarter-century timeframe. Over the past 10 years, half of PE has UNDERPERFORMED the market. The direction of the trend does not look favorable.
Hey Steve, while you are correct I think the confusion is related to what cmdkeen (and the article authors) mean by diversification.
Whilst your comments are valid for public equity - this is simply one of several types of "asset classes" someone with billions of dollars has access too. Different, non-public asset classes can have properties distinct from bubble risks or liquidity.
One of the key benefits of holding a variety of asset classes, particularly the more exotic ones - is that their performance can be uncorrelated with the performance of the stock and debt markets.
Some examples of PE asset classes:
- Venture Capital (very high risk, but over a long period of time is supposed to generate 20-30% rates of return)
- Angel Investing (higher risk still, and you need many companies but also generating 20-30% returns with a big enough portfolio)
- Commercial real estate (uncorrelated to global equity market performance - rather its connected to local market performance, pretty sure around 10% can be typical for offices)
- Infrastructure projects (uncorrelated again, lower rates of return but you are locking in those returns for decades)
There are tonnes of course, but when you start talking about personally investing such large sums of money - diversification means a lot more than just buying investments in the public markets (either bonds or stocks).
Seen it referenced a few times, some digging around will get you there. Also an angel investor spoke at my university about how they invest, and mentioned returns of 23%/24% annualized if I recall - but this was asterisked with "your portfolio of companies must be greater then 20 - any less and you risk losing everything". And, your money is essentially "locked" for 5-10 years (can only get your cash when there is a liquidity event - if one happens at all)
But given there are many different flavors, sizes, vectors etc of VCs, and given many keep their numbers hush, hush - I wouldn't even know where to look for any kind of "official" numbers on it.
If you add the averages of each category(75x for the last category) in this source, you'll end up with an annualized return of 9.4% over the 10 years mentioned in the image.
That is not far of the average return of the SP500.
Regarding 1. the risk can also be substantially lower for PE firms, because A. Extensive FVDD (Financial Vendor Due Diligence) and other types of risk assessment are carried out over the negotiation phase, and you are far less susceptible to stock market movements. Also, unlike investing in public companies, the PE fund is almost always the sole investor in the business alongside a small management tie-up, meaning you actually have full control over the business financially and strategically
You can increase your returns by diversifying into uncorrelated assets even if that other asset has returns that underperform the market.
That's why you see the 80/20 stock/bond split recommended so often. Even though bonds underperform stocks, the 80/20 split regularly rebalanced outperforms 100% stocks. Rebalancing is an automatic "buy low / sell high" strategy. After a stock market crash your 80/20 split might be 50/50 so you take that 30% and buy cheap stocks...
Actually, the 80/20 portfolio will decrease returns vs the market. It will outperform on a risk adjusted basis, ie have a higher sharpe ratio (maybe). But the highest return portfolio will always be the one that allocates 100% to the highest returning asset - in this case all to stocks.
No matter how much you diversify your long-only strategies, you will still not even be close to market neutral, which is probably what you really want at that scale.
With LBOs, much of the outperformance is due to leverage. If you could lever up the s&p 500, say 25%, you’d likely get much better returns. Because PE firms don’t aggressively revalue assets, they don’t have to face margin calls the same why someone would with an asset that is priced daily.
There is also BBVA's Mirrorgate that was inspired by Hygieia. It looks like Hygieia has been split out from Capital One and more connectors are being produced to make it usable by people who have other tools beyond just what they use.
If you're operating in a financial services world with audit requirements and other large scale organisation joys this could be well worth a look.
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!” ― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts