During the mid/late-90s, electronic trading networks eSpeed (acquired by NASDAQ) and BrokerTec (acquired by NEX, which was then acquired by CME) rolled out central order limit booking (CLOB) for the inter-dealer trading of US Treasuries. Today, more than 80% of dealer-to-dealer Treasury volumes are electronic, the overwhelming majority of which is executed via CLOB. The […]
I recently did an interview with my friend @LibertyRPF. It will serve as a substitute for my 2020 year-end review since it contains everything I wanted to say (and more). With permission from @LibertyRPF, I have reproduced the interview below. You can access the original here. Interview with David Kim a.k.a. Scuttleblurb 𝕊𝕡𝕖𝕔𝕚𝕒𝕝 𝔼𝕕𝕚𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 #𝟙 Scuttleblurb is one of […]
Banks, regulators, and fixed income investors rely on Moody’s and S&P to provide a consistent and standardized metric of credit risk across names and over time. As I explained in The Self-Reinforcing Standards Moat: …ratings underpin the risk weightings that banks attach to assets to determine capital requirements, dictate which securities a money market fund […]
In the decade or so leading up to the mid-2000s, FactSet was in the business of aggregating third-party content from a variety of different vendors – financial information from Thomson Reuters; index data from MSCI, Russell, and S&P; trading data from exchanges – cleaning it up, hosting it on mainframes, and rendering it on workstations […]
Industrial enzyme production beings with several thousand bacteria dunked into ever larger containers of liquid and nutrients. These microorganisms feast on the nutrients and replicate like crazy before being transferred to a fermenter — a giant steel vat that regulates temperature, pressure, oxygen, and Ph levels — where they are suspended within another nutrient-infused medium. […]
A deep local presence can confer competitive advantages in industries with low entry barriers. Rollins typically commands the largest share in its markets, allowing it to service more houses per technician outing than competitors, resulting in greater labor productivity and scale economies on marketing and branch overhead. Fastenal clusters its stores near customers, permitting steady […]
Autodesk, Dassault, and PTC were all founded as CAD companies in the ‘80s but have since become much more than that. PTC first integrated PLM and is now branching off into industrial IoT and augmented reality. Dassault (which also moved into PLM and simulation) and Autodesk are no longer just supplying software tools to solve […]
CarMax sells more cars in a single year than Carvana has sold in its entire existence and yet has half the latter’s enterprise value as the market has come to appreciate that buying cars online is becoming a real thing and Carvana is best positioned to profit from this channel shift. CarMax was version 1.0 […]