Top Reads, Listens & Follows of the week
Our values are where the money is
Takeaways:
This is pretty incredible. It’s from the piece by Tom Morgan linked below.
“At Apple’s market capitalization alone—after shedding nearly $750 billion in 2022—you can buy the world’s 50 most valuable mining companies, the next 50, and have enough left over to snap up three years of global copper mine production and buy 2022's seaborne iron ore.”
Apple is also now bigger than the entirety of the Russell 20001 .
There’s really no clearer indication of what we value than where we put our money. For now and the past few years, it’s big tech and nothing else really. This despite the fact that it’s been fashionable and convenient for many to opine on the urgent necessity to enable the renewable energy transition.
The facts are that current capital expenditures on the commodities required to accomplish the energy transition aren’t sufficient to accomplish the lofty goals we (the developed world) have set. Much of the passive ESG crowd is focused on raising the cost of capital for the firms that pull these raw materials out of the Earth, not investing in them.
The current facts may simply be a manifestation of our behavioral bias for immediate consumption over delayed rewards. In Vaclav Smil’s book How the World Really Works he notes, “A commonly used climate-economy model indicates the break-even year for climate mitigation efforts launched in the early 2020’s would be around 2080. Are the young citizens of affluent countries ready to put these distant benefits ahead of more immediate gains? Are they willing to sustain this course for more than half a century even as the low-income countries with growing populations continue, as a matter of basic survival, to expand their reliance on fossil carbon?”
For now we have our answer.
Reads: If you have trouble accessing some of these reads, try this
Tom Morgan says Something’s Gotta Give in the energy transition (here)
ProPublica: The Ugly Truth Behind “We Buy Ugly Houses” (here)
Ken Griffin’s Hand-Picked Math Prodigy Runs Market-Making Empire (here)
The Navy SEAL Who Went to Ukraine Because He Couldn’t Stop Fighting (here)
Patience by Jason Zweig (here)
Listens:
Dr. Bill Ziemba, statistics expert, sports analytics, horse racing, and investing (here)
Barry Ritholtz and Howard Lindzon on Business Ideas Before the Internet (here)
Lawrence Hamtil and Value Stock Geek (here)
Follow, Watch & Other great content:
60 Minutes: Mormon whistleblower on the church’s investment firm (here)
