Intersection notepad

High-yield has long been disregarded as a barometer for risk appetite after the last economic slowdown (2011/2008) as interest rate has been pushed to zero thus yield-chasing investor was indirectly forced to chase HY for some years now, perhaps even with asymmetrical risk and "guaranteed" return. Generally speaking, any given securities will falls under the … Continue reading Sept 2017: High-Yield Spreads as a Barometer + Bond Covenant Index & a commentary on relative non-absolute %

In the previous article we focus on some of the potential implications of the growing popularity of ETFs under the notion that they are better than the good old mutual fund simply because ETFs can be traded throughout the trading day. This is somewhat a true liquidity to the traders and ETF holders, but perhaps … Continue reading Implication and Price Discovery of ETF Hedge on Illiquid Securities & The US Treasury’s Public-Private Investment Program(PPIP)

ETFs have grown in popularity, in fact on a exponential scale, in the past decade or so but even more so in absolute term, after 2010. In the past ten years alone, we experienced an inflow of $1.40 trillion dollars into ETFs products and outflow of $1.20 trillion dollars from mutual funds. ETFs became real … Continue reading Potential Hidden Dangers of ETFs

The pension time bomb is something we have to watch closely as a country. For example, Illinois state bond is close to getting rated under a junk status. We are not talking about a failing city like Detroit, but a whole state. Pension fund is designed to not take financial slowdowns thus ever slowdown or … Continue reading Pension, Demographic Time Bomb

2017 has been a pivotal year for me, in terms of my professional progression. I decided to resign from my finance job at a tech company in early 2017 to embark on a startup building journey of no return. I have decided to launch 6 products in 6months, which equates to about 1 every 4 … Continue reading Launch 6 Products in 6 Month

De-dollarization Accelerates: China Readies Yuan-Priced Crude Oil Benchmark Backed By Gold. Three points of interests: 1) Equity Market Maturity - Their equity market does not have the maturity to sustain such a large liquidity, not to mention their public equity/debt market foundation is still work in progress. While we see headlines of huge rounds of … Continue reading De-dollarization Accelerates: China Readies Yuan-Priced Crude Oil Benchmark Backed By Gold

Today on my drive to meet with one of @Enjoyful customers to discuss the pain points they are facing with their customer/user flow, from becoming aware of the brand to making their 1st purchase to ultimately making their recurring purchases, I pop up my @Rockship.FM and came across a very interest podcast episode (btw, I set … Continue reading Customer Acquisition via Arbitrary Weather Data?

I am starting to see a few brands like Brandless, Inc. and Public Goods popping up here and there and have noticed a few things: (1) There are different ways they play with the margin game, each with its own implications. (a) Fixing the price @ </= $3 (b) Offering a lower price relative to … Continue reading CPG Brands Going Brandless?

Waldo Photos is an Austin-based startup trying to change how photos are captured and distributed. Operationally, Waldo Photos works with professional photographers, events venue and/or restaurants to take pictures for you and have it match to you personal profile via a combination of facial recognition, GPS, time and album code, and delivered via a convenience … Continue reading Waldo Photos: Next Paradigm in Content Content Creator and Distribution

Medium, well-noted as the next "Wordpress" of our generation, has recently brought upon a 180 degree change to their underlying business and revenue model by moving away from ads (Ads is the leading revenue vertical for majority of content creation/consumption/aggregation platforms out there; think Pandora/Spotify, Google, Yahoo etc.)  This illustrates implications beyond just the company themselves … Continue reading Medium, Rebuilding Value on Token-Based Business Model

Recently saw this article on Twitter and thought it might be interesting to dig a bit deeper on this, plus, I have noticed a lot more software startups/companies are starting to engage in a more fluid pricing structure: https://blog.sentry.io/2017/01/05/a-new-pricing-model.html "We’re discarding our old, arbitrarily-capped plans and moving to a single, usage-based plan. The base price … Continue reading Fluid Software Product Pricing Model – Sentry.io

Voice technology is starting to become a crowded space as tech behemoths are starting to enter this area one by one, starting with the success and wide adoption of Amazon Echo. A few days ago, Google also followed the footstep with the announcing of the voice-enabled Google Home. I am sure companies like Sony, Samsung … Continue reading Voice Technology, Future of Computer Interaction?

Marketwatch FB bot sent me a message this morning regarding Snapchat raising an additional $1.81B at a valuation of $20B, propelling the company to the ultra-unicorn elite club, which include members like Airbnb, Uber and Palantir. I decided to do a quick simple analysis on where this funding stand among the members of the club. Per … Continue reading Snapchat Insane Valuation or Not?

TV viewership has been on stalling towards the latter half of the 2000's and declined drastically in the past few years. In fact, the viewership for almost all age group declined in the 20%+ range in the past five years per the Nielsen data. Only 65+ age group showed a slight 5% increase in viewership. … Continue reading Transformation of the TV Industry

You will notice an overwhelming majority of traditional movie production companies were founded back a few decades ago and rarely any in recent years. The question here is not whether innovation has stalled in this industry sector or not but rather the reasoning behind the shift in content consumer's viewership attitude and behaviors. A few weeks … Continue reading How Would You Build a Movie Studio if You Started Today?