Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

It was in October 2011 that David Einhorn presented a slideshow to the Value Investing Conference. I frankly haven't kept close tabs on the consequences: what has happened to the stock price of Green Mountain (NASDAQ: GMCR). The two year stock price chart is available here. GMCR was on its way down, off its September 2011 peak price of $110, before Einhorn said anything. For GMCR, the fall was horrid. The price was below $30 by the start of the new year 2012. It didn't start recovering for more than a year. In September 2012, its patent on its K-cups expired. This was a critical part of Einhorn's original argument : the intellectual property was the moat keeping competitors away. Those neat little pods let you brew coffee one cup at a time in your kitchen, (or in a hotel suite) and people were willing to pay premium prices for that convenience. After September 2012 had passed and the patent protection was lost: at least that loss had been further discounted into pr...

Not long ago I read the novel DEATH BENEFIT by Robin Cook. The set up is this: after the financial crisis of 2008, two newly unemployed bankers started LifeDeals Inc.  Their business plan? selling annuities to people with known illnesses, and given their database about the medical facts along with the tendency of many humans to be excessively optimistic about their own longevity, they could do so on terms profitable to themselves.  The two principals of LifeDeals are distinguished as characters: Russell is the quant and computer geek, Edmund the hale alpha male. The key to the plot is that LDI is heavily dependent on its settlements with patients with diabetes. Thus, a breakthrough in research into the regeneration of the pancreas using stem cells could destroy it. Another business entity that enters into the plot is called Big Skies. This seems to be a multi-strategy hedge fund, and it is shorting LDI in the credit derivatives market (in oth...

My recent reading includes SYBIL EXPOSED: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case (2011) by Debbie Nathan. The gist of the book is that psychotherapy is the disease it affects to cure. Here's a key passage, describing the condition of Shirley Mason, the real life analog to the woman we all think we know as 'Sybil,' as of 1958.  "Almost four years had passed since Shirley first walked into Connie's office as an upbeat graduate student with nagging but bearable emotional problems. Now, after hundreds of hours of therapy and countless pills, shots, and machine-induced convulsions, she was a thirty-five-year-old junkie who spent most of her time in bed and who, when she did get up, checked her mail box for money from her father, or walked the streets muttering to herself." The Connie in question is Cornelia Wilbur, a psychiatrist whose training was steeped in a very strict Freudian orthodoxy, including a firm belief in ...