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TradeSmith Daily

December 2019

Never Forget the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894

December 17, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

You should never forget the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894. No seriously, it’s good investing advice. That will take some explaining, so here goes. First off, the Great Horse Manure Crisis was absolutely a real thing. The problem was that, at the turn of the 20th century, cities were drowning in the stuff. By the year 1900, the city of London had more than 50,000 horses employed for human transport. The horses pulled 11,000 hansom cabs — a kind

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How Self-Driving Cars Will Transform Cities

December 16, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

Self-driving cars will completely transform urban city landscapes, and possibly even change the nature of real estate as we know it. This transformation will both create and destroy trillions of dollars in wealth, not just in the automotive industry, but all the industries adjacent to it. Headed into 2020, self-driving cars are a disappointment relative to expectations. They were supposed to be dominating the roads by now, and they obviously aren’t. The “minor details” of making self-driving technology sufficiently reliable

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Why Drone Could Replace Your Washing Machine and Dryer

December 13, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

Lately we’ve been discussing the wild technology impacts the world will feel in the 2020s. And again, let’s be clear: If you don’t think the next decade will be wild, you’re not paying attention. There is a convergence of tipping point trends and technological capabilities dead ahead that will create change — rapid change — like nothing we’ve seen in our lifetime. Some aspects of the 2020s landscape will be so bizarre they are hard to even grasp at first.

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Blue Energy: The Transformative Technology You’ve Never Heard Of

December 12, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

The clean energy revolution has already begun. For the past few years, if not the entire past decade, it has been laying foundations and building momentum. In the next few years, we will enter “the knee of the curve” — the point where the rate of change for clean energy impact goes from geometric to exponential. Think of a graph shaped like a hockey stick. Clean energy outputs are about to go to from the flattish part of the hockey

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Crypto Investors Are Going to Hate Central Bank Digital Currencies

December 11, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) are coming. They are inevitable now. And crypto investors are going to hate them. (Bond investors might wind up hating them, too — but that’s a different story.) China has been developing a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for years. Because of that head start, China will likely be the first country to get a CBDC to market. But other countries will follow quickly. There is already a routine string of news announcements along the

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The Man Who Broke The Back of Inflation

December 10, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

Interest rates in the United States have been falling for nearly four decades. That was largely due to one man, Paul Volcker, who died this week at age 92. The 10-year U.S. treasury yield, according to the St. Louis Fed, peaked in the vicinity of 16% in September 1981. As of this writing, the 10-year yield is below 2%. From a starting point of 16% to sub-2%, that is one heck of a slide. Some believe it will fall lower

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Everyone is Getting Pulled into the 2020 Vortex — Even the Quants

December 6, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

The year 2020 is going to be wild. Not only that, the entire decade will be wild. We’ve done a lot of research on this — and our conclusion is that the 2020s could look like a mix of the 1930s and the 1920s combined. In some ways, that’s a good thing. The 1920s saw a mind-blowing technology boom, and the 2020s will, too. But in other ways it’s a terrifying thing. The 1930s was one of the darkest decades

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Why “Unit Economics” are Silicon Valley Kryptonite

December 5, 2019TradeSmith Research Team

“Venture capitalists are pulling back from startups promising the rapid delivery of everything from groceries to dog walkers,” the Financial Times reported this week, “as the companies face pushback from workers and policymakers critical of their business models.” “What we’re seeing is an increased scrutiny on unit economics that’s being imposed by investors,” said the head of investments for a venture firm. When Silicon Valley investors start talking “unit economics,” you know the party’s over. It is like focusing on

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