Just like market reports, reliable business statistics are hard to come by. Somewhere between 0.00006% and 2.5% of companies reach the billion-dollar milestone. There’s an order of magnitude or two between those two numbers, but the message is clear nonetheless: The odds of becoming a billion-dollar success are pretty darn high. Of course, there are […]
The biggest problem with SPACs wasn’t that they were structured to give retail investors the short end of the stick, it was that they didn’t provide enough information to make an informed investment decision. When Planet Labs (PL) filed their year-end results, requests came pouring in for us to revisit the company following our piece […]
Space: The final frontier … probably because it’s the last place you want to invest your money right now. Special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) have bred faster than tribbles over the last couple of years, absorbing every tech company with a pipe dream and a pipeline that promised billions in projected revenues. These blank check […]
Nothing screams “I know nothing about investing” more than someone who celebrates short-term stock price movements. Unless you’ve moved to capture alpha by closing your position, you have a paper gain and have achieved nothing. Many the newbie “investor” has watched a stock gain +100% and then ended up selling at a -50% loss. The […]
There’s an entire contingent of twats on Twitter who think the way to be a successful investor is to find one stock they like and then cram it down everyone’s throats as if they’re selling Amway products. If you criticize their sacred cow in the slightest way, they become unhinged. A better way to use […]
In 2004, Blockbuster video had reached its peak with 9,000 brick-and-mortar stores worldwide and a new store opening every 17 hours. Today, there’s just one left in Bend Oregon – the last Blockbuster store. If you were an investor in Blockbuster at that time, what metrics would you have been watching to make sure you exited your […]
We’ve covered hundreds of startups over the years at Nanalyze, and many of them have started going public in what has become a record-breaking year for IPOs. Quite a few of these companies have chosen to go through the back door to the public markets through reverse mergers with special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). In […]
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into space, there’s been another SPAC attack. NewSpace company Terran Orbital just announced plans to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). We had finally finished slogging through a dozen shiny investor decks, starting two years ago with space tourism company […]
There aren’t that many trillion-dollar industries left where technology isn’t already shaking things up. One of the last dinosaurs to be hit by the asteroid of technological disruption is the insurance game. Specifically, we’re talking about property and casualty (P&C) insurance, which represents $1.6 trillion in premiums and accounts for about one-third of the entire […]
There’s no such thing as a free lunch. That’s the title of a book by economist Milton Friedman that business school professors expect you to read as part of your bee school experience. It’s a dreadfully boring book that you can skip by simply pondering what it says on the tin. The saying “there ain’t […]