Crumbs

Wandisco

Symmetry invests in a company called WANdisco. Crazy name, crazy business. Read more. I don’t recall where, but I’ve read negative things about WANdisco (WAND.L). One problem is that it seems to offer a one-off service for firms that want to migrate their data to the cloud. Once this is done, presumably WANdisco is finished (and receives no more income). Also, Microsoft and AWS seem to offer their own competing products. These may not be as good as WANdisco’s not, but with the sort of resources they command can it be long before they are competitive. And, without a referral from the cloud provider, how is the customer ever going to know about WANdisco?

As the article says, they are a natural acquisition candidate, both for the big cloud data providers and for Snowflake. It’s an interesting business area though.

Far East stonks

Korean and Taiwanese markets have taken off like TSLA:

Maybe they are the beneficiaries of a pivot away from China? Taiwan gets a lot of manufacturing done in China, so I’m not sure how this will pan out.

XLE ain’t oil

As The Market Ear pointed out a while ago.

Winners and losers

From the FT:

What can go wrong in 2021

From the FT. TL;DR: inflation and debt.

If something can’t go on for ever, it will stop — Herb Stein.

Yes, but it will go on for a lot longer than you expect — Rudi Dornbusch.