Numeric Narrator

"The prevalent tendency to underweight or ignore distributional information is perhaps the major source of error in forecasting. Planners should therefore make every effort to frame the forecasting problem so as to facilitate utilizing all the distributional information that is available."   - Bent Flyvbjerg   We are always asking the question “what’s next” in our head. Our intuitive thinking aka “System 1” guides us for the actions we do repeatedly. Outcomes of these actions are mostly known. And then we come across situations where there are lots of unknowns. Be it a project you are starting out or a company you are investigating in for investment purpose, you want to forecast.  Inside view informs you about the capacity and resources you have while outside view takes you to a reference point (e.g. success rate of others in the same project with same level of capacity and resources) which gives you an indication of where the ballpark is. From there, you can take your f

  " One lesson western thought has had to learn slowly in modern times is that if we try hard enough to reduce anything to pure logic..........such attempts founder. The world can not be reduced to pure logic and caged within it. Sooner or later it slips out to reveal its true messiness, and all such projects fail." -W. Brian Arthur   Ant Colony: Social insects (ants, bees, social wasps etc.) take large territorial possession displacing solitary insects (cockroaches, grasshoppers, beetles etc.) from the most favored nest sites and defensible foraging ranges. Social insects like ants possess such environmental dominance because they act as superorganism where heterogeneous agents (with different tasks at hand) engage in cooperative group behavior. The order in which the ant colony operates, it looks like a functional whole. But nothing in the brain of a worker ant represents a blue print of the social order. The self organizing nature of the colony makes the d

At the age of 22, Nassim Nicholas Taleb received an advice he deems important but avoids giving to anyone else because of the risk assigned to it. A second year Wharton student told him to get a profession that is “scalable”, that is, one in which you are not paid by the hour and thus subject to the limitations of the amount of your labor. Most of us choose profession that are not scalable. These professions produce income that are limited by hours and the labor we put. A baker needs to bake every single piece of bread in order to satisfy each additional customer while a writer expends the same effort to attract one single reader as she would to capture several hundred million. But “scalable” professions come with uncertainty that “not scalable” professions don’t. Only few in scalable professions do well and most of them face the wrath of inequalities in such professions. Some get all the spotlight while most remain under the shadows. It has "winner take it all" risk. I w

Have been looking at Ant’s business and its evolution to get some perspective on mobile money business. Here are few notes. Beginning Ant's Alipay took advantage of banks' inefficiency in penetrating large section of retail and small businesses market. The company started as a trusted payment option for shoppers and merchants of Alibaba. It worked as an escrow account, transferring money to sellers after buyers had received their products. Later Alipay app was launched, introduced QR code for payments. Alipay earns ~0.1% per transaction which is less than what banks earn on debit-card swipes. The company plays the volume game here. But the growth in payment business is slowing. Because of Alipay's sheer volume in payment business, it found advantage of key resource "DATA" to drive its other businesses. Alipay app started as mere payment app but expanded its branches to different segments namely credit, asset management and insurance. Recently its credit wing ove

Arrival of the pandemic and the following monetary stance have shifted some key macro variables to the extreme. One of the major windfalls of the pandemic for Bangladesh economy is remittance. Restriction of cross border movement shut the illegal remittance market (e.g. hundi). As a result, remittance in the book grew significantly posting 50-60% YoY (Year over Year) growth for the last few months. Some other factors may have played some role too in this regard, but this one is thought to be the most significant one. With the falling import and moderate export growth, remittance turned out to be a significant driver towards the swelling BoP surplus. This gives the central bank, Bangladesh Bank, a lot of flexibility in conducting expansionary monetary stance to support the economy in its critical time. We are observing a time when there is ample liquidity in the financial system, BoP surplus growing, interest rate falling and inflation remaining at comfortable range. I wil

I have been using writing as my gateway to clarity. There are so many things we go through on a daily basis. We are consuming information at a rate like never before. We have myriad of options to distract our mind. But we rarely take time to reflect. When we are engaged in something, we just go by the routine. Each step leads us to another step. We rarely act and mostly react. When I analyze every critical action of mine, I find lots of flaws and irrationality in my behavior. When I sit down with pen and paper or in front of the monitor with keyboard, I give myself access to things I usually overlook. In doing so, I figure out that I am wired to panic even if there is no need to. I am supposed to overthink because we are programmed to hold pessimism as a shield to any unwanted scenario. Cultivating fear increases our chance of survival. We have been carrying these instincts with us for a long time. We can't just shrug it off. And there is some virtue in possessing just right amount

Here I will be trying to connect the dots to see where things can be placed and how some events were unfolded. Now, I will tell you to consider it as a drill where I will be trying to refresh my own thoughts and understanding. In the future I want to look back and see what I missed and why I missed them. I will keep it as a story moving in a linear time. I am considering the timeline when I have actively followed the market. In retrospect, everything seems to connect but back then I couldn’t quite gauge the extent of everything that was about to be followed. Probably, in some cases, I did understand the direction the market was following but my personal investing strategy would tell you otherwise. There were lots of biases in place and more importantly I was someone who just started out and was confronting all the emotional roller coaster I put myself in. I am still figuring out ways to stick to my strategy and tackling the emotional upheaval I face every now and then depending on how

Kenya is healing from an unintended setback erupted from violation of the law of economy. Government of Kenya’s attempt to control interest rate backfired as economy drifted towards slow lane due to slower private sector credit growth and reduced signalling effects of monetary policy. Kenya is learning and so are many economies from their policy failures. In this video I dig into the causes and effects of interest rate controls and it’s inevitability of failure. I took help from IMF’s working paper titled “Do Interest Rate Controls Work? Evidence from Kenya” and some other articles on the topic. In October 2019, Kenya’s parliament repealed its cap on lending rate as majority went with president’s refusal to keep the cap intact. It finally makes way for central bank of Kenya to play an active role in the Economy after being in the hibernation for three years. This case of capping lending rate far below from the existing market rate is a prime example where Economy falls a

“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models.”  Charlie Munger I was reading the book “ Narrative Economics ” by Robert J. Shiller. As I was Reading I got stuck at a particular word. And that word is “Overspecialization”. I put a pause and asked myself if there is such thing as “Overspecialization”. If there is some phenomena of “too much knowledge or too much expertise in a certain discipline or area”. Well, there can’t be anything of that sort. There is no such thing as “too much knowledge or too much expertise”. There is always room for more. But I knew the author didn’t put it that way. He used the term “overspecialization” to refer to the phenomena where you become too mu