What's Interesting In Business News: Equity Research Pricing, Mifid2, Corporate Access, AI, $SHOP vs $AMZN vs $WMT, Lotus 123, Commissions, Yahoo Finance, Alt Data, Libra, $WORK, $TWTR, Palantir
July 15, 2019 #16
Bloomberg publishes the prices for written bank research subscriptions: JP Morgan: $10k Citi: $10k Deutsche Bank: $10k Morgan Stanley: $25k Goldman: $25k Bank of America: $30k
Wall Street Now Hawks Research Like a Budget Airline Sells Seats
T. Rowe Price sends out a formal press release telling the sell side that they will continue to use their corporate access services. That WSJ article must have ruffled some feathers. But. T Rowe does not deny the article substance.
T. Rowe Price Statement on Corporate Access
A Morgan Stanley algorithm analyzes Morgan Stanley analyst research to "read between the lines" to find how an analyst really feels.
Morgan Stanley used AI to study its own analysts and figured out how to beat the market
Barron’s sums it up.
2 ways to succeed in equity research today:
1/ support investment banking within a bank
2/ run a small lean independent research shop
Deutsche Bank Is Quitting Stock Trading. What It Means for Equity Research.
A chatbot to search for research is something that I would guess no investor wants.
See the recent story on how Quartz shut down their news chat app for the same reason.
Mifid2 is a mess. Nice writeup by Integrity.
US Congress Proposes MiFID II Study
Nice writeup on how to compete with $AMZN. Be like Shopify, not Walmart. $WMT for $SHOP? Not too late
Shopify and the Power of Platforms
WSJ reminds us about some of the first killer apps that drove platform sales. They were spreadsheets.
VisiCalc-> killer app
Lotus 123 -> killer app
Excel -> killer app
Will Google Sheets be next? I am very impressed with what they are doing.
40 Years Later, Lessons From the Rise and Quick Decline of the First ‘Killer App’
*Bundled* commissions in the US are down again according to @GreenwichAssoc
Mifid2 accelerating buy-side move to standalone payments for research.
US bundled equity commissions fall by nearly half in decade
A legal edge that professional investors have over retail investors is a budget to buy "alternative" data and have a better view into earnings before the company reports.
How hedge funds use drones, satellite images and web scraping to gain an edge
Verizon considered selling Yahoo Finance. They decided not to.
I am actually amazed how well Yahoo Finance traffic holds up today given how bad the site it. A new owner could have injected some new thinking. See google trends blue line with some comparisons.
A professor does a nice job explaining that Facebook $FB is doing the world (and itself) a great favor by pushing Libra. It is forcing governments and regulators to seriously think about a modern identity system and more efficient international monetary system. Libra has already succeeded.
Slack recently reported dramatically slower growth. Recode sources a survey of enterprise buyers who are picking Microsoft Teams over Slack due to price.
It will be interesting to see how investors react to $WORK over the next few quarters.
Microsoft is beating Slack because it’s hard to argue with free
Investigative journalists could be paid much, much, much better as analysts for hedge funds finding short ideas.
An Open IPO Window Will Save Investigative Journalism
AI has conquered the most complex form of poker. No point in even trying to play online since you will get beat by a bot every time.
This New Poker Bot Can Beat Multiple Pros—at Once
Interesting writeup on the software that police and government agencies use to identify people. With power like this I don’t understand how any crime goes unsolved and any suspect goes unfound.
It’s pretty clear that police agencies have very detailed profile, location, history, and human network data on every human. Seems similar to the databases that Google, Facebook and others own.
Revealed: This Is Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops