Pink Sheets

I do my best high level thinking from 35,000 feet. Literally. On this trip, the biggest insight I had was one that was pretty much along the same lines as what I've observed before. Quoting from my semi-private travel blog:

Essentially the simplified "note to self" was to look for, and take, the really big moves when they show up. This is something from the game of go. You can play go and have every one of your stones be a good move and still lose the game because you missed, at a few key points, very big moves which change the entire direction of the game. Sometimes what seems like a good big move is wrong, but that's ok. Mistakes will happen regardless of whether you're playing it safe or looking for big moves. That is what I saw last night! [ValueClick was a big move, but I treated it like a garden variety investment.]

At this point in time, I've had enormous amounts of time to evaluate and shuffle my investments. I believe that I now hold a basket of very big moves, although the market prices are all down.

Another observation was that in larger markets, there's a stonger incentive to scale things. This may not seem important, but I've observed more than one highly successful entrepreneur who didn't scale up their business because of a personal choice. I believe that when China and India become part of the global middle class and as the world becomes more of a single market, the incentive will be much stronger for any given local success to scale up to a global level. And there will be specialized businesses whose purpose is to assist others in scaling up like this.

So many brands in Australia are American: McDonalds, KFC, Krispy Kreme, Calvin Klein (the jeans cost US$120), Safeway, etc. General Motors owns Holden, a big car maker there. I walked through the the stores at a mall and through a Safeway and found a remarkable number of same or similar brands. Even vegemite is sold by Kraft. In spite of this, everything there is a bit different, so it's like an alternate universe directly beneath the feet of Americans.

I saw real signs of inflation in Australia. Housing prices are unsustainable in Melbourne. Products and services are expensive and the costs have been rising.

Of course, out of the blue and without any warning, I stumbled into a black swan.