Before we start this week’s links, there is a small change that I’m going to experiment with over the next few weeks. Everything that I share on the weekend links has already been shared by me on my Twitter feed and in a lot of cases, I discover these articles on Twitter as well. I’m going to credit links by linking back to the Twitter profiles of the people who shared these articles and if you were so inclined, you could follow these people.
That said, let’s start this week with Ajay Shah’s post on the Pew Global Attitudes Project which has some interesting takes on how Indians think about the current economic environment and how it compares with other countries. This is a very good post which is a quick read and is well worth your time.
The third most interesting thing for me was that 92% of Indians blame the government for our ills (perhaps the remaining 8% surveyed were politicians) and there is just one country with a higher percentage blaming its government, which is Pakistan with 95% of its population blaming the government for their situation.
The second most interesting thing was that 61% Indians support market economy and there are only 4 countries above us. I would have guessed this number to be much lower but it looks like the better living standards of the last two decades have convinced people that free markets are much better than government run institutions.
The most interesting thing was that 74% Chinese favor market economy! This is only lower than 75% for Brazil and even higher than the US.
Next up, this fascinating article on what pieces of customer information big retailers are interested in and how they go after it. A quote: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? â€
The RBI Governor, Dr. Subbarao expressed concern that the government makes the financial institutions it has stake in take ad- hoc and detrimental investing decisions.
The Economist has a fascinating piece on Mr. Seth Klarman who is the boss of the 9th biggest hedge fund in the world – Baupost Group, which has an incredible track record over 3 decades that includes just 2 negative years since this fund started in 1982.
Digg, which is one of the earliest social media sites sold for what is a paltry sum of $500,000 last week, and the WSJ has an interesting interview with its founder. (via @Liz Heron)
I used to be a heavy Digg user but was never able to successfully promote OneMint on Digg. At that time I mainly attributed that to the fact that I don’t write things that are viral in nature, and my writing style doesn’t help either.
Since it felt so difficult to share links on Digg, I finally gave up altogether. This is a point that comes up in this article also when comparing it with how easy it is to share something on Twitter or Facebook versus how hard it was to do it on Digg.
This has been really true with my own experience where the traffic that OneMint gets from Twitter is so tiny that spending more than a few seconds sharing the link there would be a waste of time, but the service is so good that it just takes a few seconds to share the link there.
Kiran writes about Coromandel International’s bonus debenture issue which was a special situation investing opportunity, and while that opportunity doesn’t exist any longer, I think is an excellent post to learn how to track such situations and then track them in real time. (via @Kiran D)
Finally, you may or may not have liked to hear who the under-achiever is, but there is no doubt who the Wonderachiever is. (via @Sunil Srinivasan)
Enjoy your weekend!
The article on consumer insights is simply superb!
It’s incredible what steps big corporations take and how much insight can be gleamed into consumer behavior with the right tools and methods.