In 2003, Taiwanese generic drug leader TTY Biopharm and other Taiwanese venture capital firms funded a new type of drug company. PharmaEngine was launched with the specific mission of getting to market faster with drug treatments. To reduce the time between drug discovery, the first step in formulating a new drug, and approval, the last, […]
For all the buzz, it would be easy to guess Tesla is the most innovative car maker in the world. But as our intangible-adjusted data reveals, Tesla invests less than half as much on R&D as the most innovative car company in the world. Invention in the world’s auto industry stands on the shoulders of […]
Despite the S&P 500 having made a new all-time high just a few weeks ago, many of the supposed market leaders have not kept pace. Instead, almost all of the FAANNGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Nvidia, Google) peaked out either in the summer or fall months of 2018 and have meandered under those previous highs […]
The announced tariffs have come at a rather inopportune time, economically speaking. Back in 2018 when the US was slapping tariffs on washer machines and solar panels (January ’18), steel and aluminum (March ’18) and Chinese goods broadly (July ’18) the economy looked to be strong and was getting an added boost from tax cuts […]
The relationship between the performance of emerging market stocks and the US dollar is one of the tightest macro relationships that exists in investing. As we can see in the first chart, the relative performance of EM stocks vs the S&P 500 is highly negatively correlated with the level of the dollar. That is, when […]
Last week we wrote how the US dollar could be in for a major move when it breaks up or down out of the major consolidation it has been in for the better part of six months. We wrote that given the setup of the utterly depressed level of FX volatility, a break up or […]
The US dollar is on the cusp of making a major move. The question is which way will it go, higher or lower? The directional movement of the US dollar will have significant asset performance implications once the tug of war between dollar bears and bulls is resolved. The US dollar index has been consolidating […]
So far this week, we’ve received a few data points that reinforce the manufacturing slowdown taking place in the US. Below is a calendar of events for the last couple days. On Monday, we got the Empire State Survey, a survey of manufacturing in New York. Importantly, this is one of the few “soft” data […]
When Lyft went public on the last trading day of March, investors learned the firm has staked its future to the street-level adoption of autonomous vehicles. Aside from the legal and ethical concerns, social anxieties and scandals, driverless cars still have major technology hurdles to clear: they are dependent on a future that successfully employs […]
The tale from some of the most cyclical and predictive economic indicators are telling investors two very different things at the moment. Copper, the metal with a PhD in economics is giving us the all-clear sign while lumber, which is perhaps only regarded as having a master’s or bachelor’s in economics, is saying, “be careful.” […]