Hi all,
This Saturday I returned to the UK after a little over a month in the locked-down Netherlands. I’m interested to see how well England’s ‘living with the virus’ strategy will work out but based on the graph I shared in the last issue I think there is cause to be mildly optimistic!
📃 Here are some things I think you’ll find interesting:
Valuation: (1) NFTs: the $46,300 PNG of a pet rock
Skills: (1) CFI and the FMVA course
Web: (1) Astro: the framework of frameworks
Have a good week!
🔍Valuation
I’m a firm believer in at least semi-rational markets (in the long run), meaning that I think price will eventually match the intrinsic value (e.g. the cashflows of a company adjusted for risk and time value of money).
It’s because of this that I particularly enjoy looking at the crypto movement, and more recently the stock market as a whole. There seems to be widespread optimistic speculation purely based on price. If you’re a crypto investor with an actual reason that Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. have intrinsic value please reach out (I’ve heard a lot of arguments, none convincing).
🐦 “ROCK THREAD: Why I spent $46,300/15 ETH for a PNG file of a grey pet rock”
You’ve probably heard of them by now: NFTs. Digital collectibles underpinned by a blockchain to proof that you are the sole “owner” (whatever that means in this case). From a valuation standpoint it’s a bit like valuing an art piece (near impossible, aside from its ability to hide funds from tax agencies). Pricing wise though, people seem very optimistic with @degenharambe paying $46,300 for a PNG of a rock. Think of all the layers of explanation it would take to explain that to someone a century ago.
🎓Skills
I’ve had a couple people ask me how I churn out Excel models quickly. In my case it’s been driven by personal interest, various internships (thank you EY VME Rotterdam), and academic coverage. However, I’ve also completed the Financial Modelling & Valuation Analyst (FMVA) course by Corporate Finance Institute (CFI).
Not only is it a super practical course, focusing on the areas where you’ll notice your improvement the most in your day-to-day, it also covers financial methods in great detail (including various valuation models). I highly recommend it to anyone looking to improve their Excel/Finance skills quickly.
CFI has recently switched to a subscription model (which I’m not a big fan of) but still provides great value. I’m looking to improve my Business Intelligence knowledge & skills soon so I might start the BIDA program soon (which if you may as well follow as well if you’re paying for a year of access).
Corporate Finance Institute - FMVA
Get your exclusive discount for a Corporate Finance Institute subscription. Enroll today with my link!
🌐Web
Plenty of people have dabbled with “web development” in their own way by learning a bit of HTML and CSS. However, past the basics lies insanity these days. The web is evolving rapidly and to make your website dynamic you use Javascript. In recent years “the new standard” frameworks have been popping up, React, Vue, etc. they all promise you great ease of development but come at a cost.
They inject a lot of Javascript into the page, which makes a webpage slow to load for the first time.
Perhaps more importantly, they have all sorts of new standards you need to adhere to in your code, which can be very daunting for beginners.
If you are building a mostly “static” website and need a bit of interactivity for a date picker for example, why would you include all this bulk?
Astro solves these issues. It allows you to keep using “file-based routing” like you do with standard HTML files. But: it allows you to use Reach, Vue, Svelte, etc. in your page when needed, and even mixing them! By default it renders to static (super fast) HTML.
Recently, Astro has received $7M in seed money to develop it further into a comprehensive and easy to use tool. It has the potential to move the web towards a simpler model again
Personally, I’m using Astro to build my new website which you’ll hear more about soon.
Astro is an open-source tool that can build static HTML websites using popular frontend JavaScript frameworks (React, Vue, Svelte), while loading fully inter…
⏭️Next
I didn’t have many items this week but I hope some of them interested you nonetheless. For feedback please reach out to [email protected].
What I’m up to:
I’m still reading “Finish what you start” by Peter Hollins and will give a quick book review soon.
I’m starting a bunch of courses this week and hope to write some blog posts about the theories covered there.
I’ve been selling course summaries for a while now and want to share my findings as a post as well, including some numbers.
I’ll be going on a podcast soon about our BrewDog market research
Talk to you next week!