Five stories that caught my eye and what I took form them.
Breakthrough: Ohalo’s Boosted Breeding Technology Unveiled – David Friedberg
- ‘Boosted’ breeding a gamechanger in agtech, claims Ohalo CEO (agfundernews.com)
- The AgTech/genetics startup Ohalo has unveiled its Boosted Breeding technology which aims to make crop breeding more efficient by taking luck and coincidence out of it.
- Boosted Breeding enables plants to inherit the entire genome from both parents, ensuring all beneficial traits are passed on, rather than a random selection.
- This technology can increase yields by 50-100%, and improve disease and pest resistance.
- The technique doesn't introduce foreign genes it simply allows the plant to utilise its existing genetic potential more effectively.
- They are starting with potatoes, but this technology can be applied to nearly any crop.
- Bottom line: Higher yielding, more resistant crops is another driver of less land use for agriculture in the future.
Market Access and Retail Investment Performance – deHaan et al
- Market Access and Retail Investment Performance | The Accounting Review | American Accounting Association (aaahq.org)
- Investing is one of the best long-term ways to build wealth. In that sense, making it easier for retail investors to participate in financial markets is a good thing. There has been much progress on that front in recent years.
- But with great power, comes great responsibility. And with increased opportunities, come increased risks.
- This study examines whether easier market access in the form of expanded trading hours improves or harms retail investors' performance.
- The results indicate that limiting trading hours curbs active retail trading, leading to improvements in portfolio performance.
- Bottom line: For retail investors, longer trading hours = more active trading = worse performance
Far From Perfect: Inverted Yield Curves Don't Reliably Predict Recessions or the Direction of the Markets – Bob Elliott
- Far From Perfect: Inverted Yield Curves Don't Reliably Predict Recessions or the Direction of the Markets | Portfolio for the Future | CAIA
- Predicting the future is hard, very hard. That’s why even sophisticated investors are drawn to overly simple rules and indicators. However, these simplifications often disappoint.
- The latest failed 'perfect' recession indicator is the yield curve. The US yield curve inverted in October 2022, but we’re still waiting for a recession.
- For equity investors, the yield curve has always been a dubious signal due to the varied lag time from inversion to market peak, ranging from immediate to 30 months. It's at best a vague signal for adopting a late-cycle strategy.
- Bob shows that any predictive power lies within 18 months post-inversion. Beyond that, the probability of a recession in the next 6 months is similar to the average chance of recession in any 6-month period.
- The yield curve is a mediocre recession predictor and a terrible equity predictor.
- Bottom line: Predicting economies and markets is hard, stop looking for a magic short-cut.
Where Does a Bitcoin ETF Fit in an Allocator’s Portfolio? – Matt Toledo
- Where Does a Bitcoin ETF Fit in an Allocator’s Portfolio? | Chief Investment Officer (ai-cio.com)
- Recently, the State of Wisconsin Investment Board became the first public pension to announce an allocation ($160m) to a bitcoin ETF.
- Broadly speaking, there is still a huge amount of reluctance across the institutional investor universe to consider crypto a serious asset class.
- This article highlights key questions institutional investors need to answer to become more comfortable with crypto: Does it have a positive expected return? How does it behave in a portfolio context? Is it a diversifier or a risk asset? What risks could it diversify? How much of its behaviour is idiosyncratic? What are reliable return drivers and are they something we can take a view on? Define what it would take to take add crypto to the asset mix?
- Bottom line: The maturing of the crypto asset class continues, but still has a long way to go.
101 real-world gen AI use cases from the world's leading organizations – Google
101 real-world gen AI use cases from the world's leading organizations | Google Cloud Blog
The cutting edge of AI has continued to shift over the past couple of weeks: GPT-4o, Google’s I/O announcements and Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs.
However, unsurprisingly, real-world implementation is lagging. This list of 101 Google customer use cases illustrates the current state.
On the positive side, the many examples show widespread engagement with AI across companies.
Yet, these examples shows that we are not (yet) witnessing a revolution in business processes. For now, Klarna’s cost-cutting and profit-boosting use of AI is an exception.
Bottom line: Flashy presentations give a glimpse of the future, but real-world AI implementations and thus whole-economy productivity gains are still in the early stages.