Hi there,
What a week. I’m now entering the “reading” week of the academic term and will spend some time working on wrapping up previous courses, creating summaries, and taking some time off.
Looking back at the past week, here are the interesting bits I found around the internet for you!
📃Contents:
⭐ Highlight: Inflated Inflation
🐂 Markets: Merger Arbitrage - what if the govt doesn’t agree?
🤖 Automation: AI voice just got a whole lot better (and may replace voice actors soon)
🎁 Extra: see exactly how the Microsoft-Activision deal happened
✍🏻 Blog: the basic supply chain model in 5 minutes
⏭️ Next: curate your own news
Have a great week!
⭐ Highlight: Inflated Inflation
Inflation might be coming for your pint next. Heineken is forecasting a significant increase in beer production prices, which will definitely result in price hikes for consumers too.
Oh and we’re definitely talking about inflation a lot. This week Panjiva (a supply-chain researcher) pointed out that 71% of earnings calls in Q4 covered the topic!
Brewer predicts 15% increase in costs and says speed of Covid recovery uncertain
Executives at big American corporations can’t stop talking about inflation as the pandemic enters a third year, according to supply-chain researcher Panjiva.
🐂 Markets: Merger Arbitrage
I wasn’t aware of this concept until now, but now that I’ve seen it it’s quite obvious. Whenever a merger is announced, the share price should rise to the acquisition share price. But that discards two types of risk compensation:
The time value of money: the spread should close at the moment the shares are actually purchased
The risk that the deal may fall through
The second one seems to be very prominent last week with Nvidia announcing it will no longer be pursuing an acquisition of Arm.
Hedge funds can bet on these risks and achieve substantial returns.
Nvidia Deal to Buy Arm From SoftBank Is Off After Setbacks
The deal, which was initially valued at $40 billion, encountered regulatory scrutiny, including an F.T.C. lawsuit.
Merger arbitrage: busted rocket deal shows hedge funds the opportunity in antitrust risk
🤖 Automation: are you convinced?
We already knew AI was getting better by the minute, but this audio clip showcases it in a way that will make actual humans feel awkward. In the video, an AI voice actor will get really emotional with you.
Definitely check it out!
This Valentine’s Day, humans won’t be the only ones teasing and acting coy. That’s because Sonantic has created the first AI that can flirt.In honor of this …
Listen to an AI voice actor try and flirt with you
🎁 Extra: inside the deal
Very rarely do you get the opportunity to look through how a huge M&A deal came together. Microsoft’s latest SEC filing is just that, an extensive report on how the deal happened. The Verge presents a brief summary of the interesting bits before you dig in.
Read exactly how Microsoft’s $68.7 billion deal for Activision Blizzard came together
✍🏻 Blog: the basic supply chain model
Sticking to my goal of writing at least one article per week, I have created a 5-minute guide to the basic supply chain model used in one of my LSE courses. It features animated gifs and tries to make the content as accessible as possible.
The basic supply chain model in 5 minutes | Feb, 2022 | Medium
If you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ve likely seen a great deal of supply chain issues pop up. In the years leading up to the pandemic, the world’s supply chains functioned like a well-oiled…
The basic supply chain model in 5 minutes
And here’s the original version from my blog (which has some suboptimal formatting that I need to fix still).
⏭️ Next
Since last Monday I’ve been using my own RSS aggregator. A piece of software that allows you to read all your news (from your favorite sources) in one single place. It can even be configured to “scrape” the entire content of an article so you don’t even have to visit the website to read it. I might do a tutorial on how to set it up soon, it was surprisingly easy!
Have a great week!