Listened to a few webinars and interviews this week. Here's the list.

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Lockdown 3.0​

PM Boris Johnson introduced UK's third lockdown citing the acute infectiousness of the new COVID variant. Brits are again to follow the stay-at-home order i.e. to go out only to shop for essentials, work, exercise, seek medical assistance or escape domestic abuse. The vulnerable are advised to shield and schools will initiate remote learning again. Due to the lockdown, Rishi "now-a-household-name-because-of-COVID" Sunak, pumping roughly £5,000,000,000 to aid businesses in retail, hospitality, and leisure sectors The grants would be worth £9,000 per property in the aforementioned sectors.

To be honest, the spread of this seemingly undefeatable enemy just doesn't make sense. We have an ocean separating our land mass from the rest of Europe (except for Ireland) and the world. The struggle is real!

Recommended Reading: What are the lockdown rules across the UK?

/Start of Thread

1/ Get a cup of coffee. In this thread, I'll walk you through the Rule of 72 -- and related "mental math tricks" for investors.

2/ As humans, we tend to think linearly. When we see a curve, we like to mentally approximate it by a straight line. This helps us cope with changes in the world around us. Changes that happen a constant pace. Changes that don't need our attention for very long.

3/ But in finance/investing, we need to think exponentially, not linearly. Money compounds. Growth doesn't happen at a constant pace; it accelerates over time. Most of us are not programmed to intuitively "get" compounding -- over the long run.

4/ So we need some "mental shorthands". Rules of thumb that help us develop intuition about exponential growth. Tricks that help us do "compounding math" in our head. One such trick is to think of compounding as a process that doubles our money every so many years.
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5/ So the question is: how long does the compounding process take to double our money? The Rule of 72 gives us a simple approximate formula for this:

Jack Ma

"Where is Mr Ma?" This is the news reverberated by the mainstream media recently, probing for clues on Jack Ma's whereabouts since his public "disappearance" for 2 months now. To recall, in October, Jack Ma made a controversial speech critiquing China's "pawnshop financial regulators and state-owned banks"; calling the latter "old people's club" and blaming the same as suppressor towards business innovation. It appears that after he made the CCP off-putting comment, nothing has ever been smooth-sailing for the billionaire, which also adversely impacted the $BABA stock price.

In early November, Mr. Ma's Ant Group IPO, dubbed as the biggest IPO in history with almost 3 trillion investor demand of its shares was rug-pulled by President Xi by postponing the enterprise's IPO. Perhaps, possibly cancelled. Furthermore, $BABA took a 13% haircut in December 24 after the Chinese regulators sniped the e-commerce giant with anti-monopoly investigation. Alibaba has to pacify its investors by expanding its multibillion share buyback programme.
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$BABA is a retail investors favourite stock and as of writing, everyone seems to be looking for the media-savvy billionaire. Maybe Guo Wengui could shed a light?


Tesla EOY Deliveries
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Hate it or love it, $TSLA has been ripping and breaking shorty shorts hearts and bank accounts since April last year. Whilst its goal is to deliver half a milly vehicles, Tesla reported 499,550 deliveries. $TSLA is now trading at $729/share or $3645 pre-split. Insane!
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​Lord Elon says, "Thanks."
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