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- It's Getting Bubbly
It's Getting Bubbly
+ Howard Marks, Cliff Asness, Morgan Housel, 2024 Trends, Waymo, GLP-1 & More
The Idea Farm
January 12, 2025
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“I don't like relative performance because I cannot eat relative bread.”
Research
Howard Marks - On Bubble Watch (10 pages)
Howard Marks expresses his view that they’re more a state of mind than a quantitative calculation. Then he lists the signs of a bubble that he sees today and suggests how you might think about them.
"In bubbles, investors treat the leading companies—and pay for their stocks—as though the firms are sure to remain leaders for decades. Some do and some don’t, but change seems to be more the rule than persistence."
Instead of writing a 10-year outlook, Cliff Asness writes as if the year is 2035 and he’s looking back on the past decade.
The study investigates historical returns across major asset classes since 1870, finding that both housing and equities have generated similar returns, though housing shows lower volatility. It also highlights that, globally, the weighted rate of return on capital was twice as high as the growth rate in the past 150 years.
Source: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. As of December 2017.
Explore the global asset management landscape through an analysis of the world’s 100 largest asset owners, uncovering their scale, influence, and the key themes reshaping the investment world today.
Source: Thinking Ahead Institute. As of November 2024.
Facts & Figures
After 25.3 million autonomous miles driven, Waymo vehicles have an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims compared to human drivers per mile driven. Link
If you shuffle a deck of cards, most likely that combination has never been shuffled by anyone, in history, ever. Link
A recent study found that “households with at least one GLP-1 user reduce grocery spending by approximately 6% within six months of adoption, with higher-income households reducing spending by nearly 9%. Link
The 15 highest-grossing movies in the world last year were all sequels, reboots or spinoffs. Link
The top 30 venture capital funds raised 75% of all VC in the US in 2024. Link
Gen Z spends an average of 109 days per year looking at a screen. Eighty percent of our waking hours are spent consuming information, up from 40% in 1980. Link
Axios highlighted the ‘current thing’ throughout 2024 based on popular Google searches. Link
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Podcasts
 8/20/24 - 64 minutes | World-renowned leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith discusses the philosophy behind effective leadership and how to balance ambition with personal fulfillment. |
 10/22/24 - 36 minutes | Housel digs into one of his favorite books of all time: The Big Change by Frederick Lewis Allen, which was written in 1952. |
 11/18/24 - 57 minutes | Gidden explains how he improved Delta’s funding status from 42% 13 years ago to 102% today, creating the largest corporate pension turnaround in history. |
