Allan Kagenza

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@iam_smx *trillioniare

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

After 2008 meltdown, vacation for me just meant email with a view, but SpaceX & Tesla are now strong enough that I can make it real (yay!!)

[SpaceX @SpaceX]

SpaceX was founded to make life multiplanetary. We’ve been able to expand that mission with our Starlink constellation and AI solution

Learn more → https://t.co/PSCyWrMUYI

[Allan Kagenza @Allankagz]

@Brunoarsn How much? check DM..

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

This $20 billion tunnel didn't just shave off minutes. it cut travel time by hours.

The 8-lane,undersea tunnel reduced travel time between Shenzhen and Zhongshan from 2 hours to approximately 20 minutes.

https://t.co/l1ntfKbQER

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock

my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive

when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost

what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise

I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily

the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing…

China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally

so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine

the gap is ARCHITECTURAL

it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks

it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study…

and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now

BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee

I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one

Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure
Merz at least had the courage to name

it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Instead of watching a 3-hour movie, watch this masterclass on AI instead

[Finance 501 @Finance_501]

JOB | A global #healthcare investor is looking for an Investment Associate to work remotely from #Africa, preferably within East Africa, esp. #Rwanda. If you have 3-5yrs in private equity, venture capital or similar within emerging markets, please DM us your LinkedIn profile.

[Finance 501 @Finance_501]

JOB | Finance Analyst | @WorldBank | Nairobi 🇰🇪 | Development Finance | Degree + Accounting Qualification + 3yrs experience + English & French proficiency | Entry-Level | Closing Jan 31 | https://t.co/LQZUFKzpI4 #IkoKaziKE #IkoKazi

[MTN Rwanda @MTNRwanda]

As the commemoration week begins, MTN Rwanda joins Rwandans and the rest of the world to remember and pay tribute to the victims of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. We honor the survivors during this mourning period.
#Kwibuka30 #KwibukaTwiyubaka 🇷🇼

[All The Right Movies @ATRightMovies]

THE MATRIX was released 25 years ago today. Acclaimed as both one of the great science fiction movies and a groundbreaking action film, the behind-the-scenes story will have you questioning reality…

1/44

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

50,000 BTC offer for a 2-bedroom apartment in New York was turned down in 2015

[Abier @abierkhatib]

“Someone has shuffled my papers” is
Still giving

#Israel

[Allan Kagenza @Allankagz]

🤣🤣

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

The Netherlands is the world’s second largest food exporter, while reducing water usage by 90% and nearly eradicating use of pesticides

[Brandon Beylo @marketplunger1]

Bruce Greenwald invited Li Lu to speak to his class on value investing.

The result is a 90 minute masterclass on how to be a value investor.

If you haven't watched the video, do it now.

If you have, it's worth re-watching.

Here is a list of my favorite quotes from Li Lu 👇

PERSONALITY OF A VALUE INVESTOR

• "Understand who you are as an investor, because you will be tested. You will have to ask yourself if you truly are a value investor."

• "Value investing goes against our evolution of following the crowds to survive."

• "You will spend most of your time as an investigative journalist. To have insatiable curiosity."

• "You almost have to be curious about everything. Because you never know where you'll get that one major insight."

INVESTOR CRITERIA

• Is it cheap?

• Is it a good business?

• Why is this opportunity available to me?

"Once you answer those questions, you really have to go for it."

INVESTMENT CASE STUDY 1: TIMBERLAND

• "The first thing I check in a company is it's valuation."

• "If you're an investor you don't care where it traded before."

• "What matters isn't the price-to-book ratio itself, but what's in the book value."

• "You want to compare the capital invested in the business to how much pre-tax cash flow the business generates using that capital."

• "So Timberland generated $100M on $200M in capital invested. So why does the opportunity exist?"

- Nike, Reebok, all the shoe brands fell off a cliff during the Asian Financial Crisis.

- Founder owns 40% of the stock

- Company was profitable and didn't need financial markets (no sell-side)

- Tons of shareholder lawsuits

• "What would be your conclusion if you were a normal mutual fund hearing this information? That management is milking the company for their own gain."

What does Li Lu do next?

• "I download every file of the shareholder court cases. That's the investigative journalist part."

• "The result was that the founder withdrew guidance and shareholders didn't like it. That was it."

How do you determine if management are decent people?

• "You've got to be an investigative journalist and find the trail of evidence. Go to their community. Introduce yourself to their friends/family/neighbors."

Total Time Commitment: "A couple of weeks of diligent/obsessive work"

• "Investing is intensive work for short bursts of time."

HOW MUCH TO BUY?

• "If you go join a fund, they'll tell you not to risk anything more than 25-50bps."

• "Think about how much effort you put in to this work. You have no downside and its trading at 5x profits."

• "So, I put a shitload of money into Timberland. Over the next 10 years it went up 7x. It was never more than 15x earnings."

• "If you're not a good analyst, you'll NEVER be a good investor."

• "When it goes up, you don't have to do a damn thing. You just sit on it and ride with it."

INVESTMENT CASE STUDY 2: KOREAN COMPANY

• "Don't think about per-share numbers. Think of yourself as an owner."

• "$236M in book value, $60M market cap, $25M net earnings."

How do you know it's cheap?

• "You must confirm that the earnings are there, and that the book value is real, liquid, and tangible."

• "They're trading at the cash value in the bank with no debt. They have hotels and department stores that they own outright. They're making $30M+ in pre-tax earnings. And insiders own 50%."

The result: Went up 5-6x

VALUE INVESTING IS NOT NATURAL

• "There's a lot of money in value investing. But it's still unnatural to most people."

• "One thing you have to do, is you have to do the work. You have to do the reps. You can make a ton of money if you really do this stuff."

• "I benefited by listening AND THEN DOING my own work. Making my own investments and mistakes."

WHAT MAKES A GREAT ANALYST

• "You must provide accurate and complete information. If you can't succeed on that, you can't succeed in this business."

• "If you're not confident about your prediction and what you know, you can't put any money when the stock's in free fall."

WHAT PROVIDES THE BIGGEST RETURNS

• "Your biggest returns will come from no more than ten tremendous insights. That's it."

• "The only way to build those insights is intense curiosity, intense study."

INVESTING MISTAKES

• "The biggest mistakes come when you buy before you've done all the work."

• "My biggest mistakes aren't buying and losing money. It's not buying and missing out on 50-60x returns."

HOW MANY COMPANIES SHOULD YOU BUY

• "I don't have any set rules on how many stocks or companies I buy. Opportunities are sporadic and it depends on the environment."

• "I usually have 3-4 big ideas. If the market is exciting, I have more opportunities. Or if the market is boring, I have fewer."

HOW LI LU ALLOCATES TIME

• "Most of the time I spend reading and studying about everything. Learning new companies and industries."

• "If I find an idea that captivates me. I stop everything and obsess over that idea."

• "Besides that, I spend a lot of time with my kid and my wife."

TL;DR:

• Be an investigative journalist.

• Work obsessively in short bursts and spend the rest. of your time learning.

• When you've done the work and have conviction, buy a shitload to make it worth it.

• Before you invest $1, make sure you can answer the three big questions: Is it cheap, is the management team good, and why does the opportunity exist.

• Never stop learning.

• Become a curiosity machine.

[Compounding Quality @QCompounding]

A CFA is the most prestigious degree you can earn as a professional investor:

• It costs around $4,000
• You need to study 1,000 hours
• The pass rates are less than 40%

Today I am sharing a 12-Page Cheat Sheet which is handy for every investor 👇

[Austen Allred @Austen]

New mortgage math is brutal.

Say you buy a $1m house with $200k down at a 7% rate ($800k mortgage).

Over the first three years you pay $193k ($5,322/mo.)

After those $193k of payments your $800k mortgage is now at $774.5k.

You paid $166k in interest, $25.5k in principle.

[Nick St. Pierre @nickfloats]

The tax on technology in Brazil is absolutely insane.

I had a friend from Brazil visit me in NYC recently. He flew here to buy a Macbook.

It was cheaper for him to buy a round-trip ticket to NYC, buy the laptop here, and fly back than it was to buy it in Brazil.

WTF?