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🧠 Useless Platitudes: "Treat trading as a business"

Bankers could be sued for $1.5tn ESG fraud

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Fink Money
November 06, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Two things to consider today.

1) A burger doesn't have a front or back until you bite it.

2) Subscribing to Premium so you can read today’s Big Brain, as well as the next 25 you’ll get for FREE as well as access to the Discord community since there’s a 30 day trial?

🧠 The Big Brain
Useless Platitudes: "Treat trading as a business."

I have a BIG problem with platitudes. Those timeless trading clichĂŠs that get rolled out time and time again.

Treat trading as a business is one I hate. Not because it’s necessarily wrong, or even bad advice. 

Just because, in my experience, most people don’t really understand what a business IS.

Instead, they start cosplaying as a business.

They’ll start tracking everything, without any thought to how the information will be useful or relevant.

More often than not, it becomes an exercise in box-ticking and record-keeping.

Newsflash: Recreating some horrifically bloated government department isn’t ‘business’…

So how is this platitude actually useful?

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⚡ The Spark
How does a bakery make a billion quid per year?

We’re a fan of looking close to home at the moment.

Last week on the old TikTok we spoke about two companies we don’t reckon will survive in 5 years time.

Here it is again for a refresher (you can hear Tim Slacking me some fire in the first few seconds - make sure to follow him on Twitter).

@fink.tok

Here’s TWO UK companies that you use A LOT that i dont think will be around in 5 years 👀 #ukeconomy #ukstocks #ukequities

Opposites: but I want to go into a little more depth on today’s TikTok on why Greggs, the UK’s favourite baker, is also my favourite UK stock.

In one simple phrase: it fucking prints money.

Nuff said: have a look at their most recent trading statement for why I have such a love for this stock…

It’s basically the same view as my McDonald’s enamouration — people love food.

They won’t stop loving food (especially Greggs, have you tasted this delight?).

So if people won’t stop loving something, you buy and hold the manufacturer’s shares.

Vegans: they’re an amazing example of a company that has moved with the times but in such a way that has become a fantastic business move.

The introduction of the vegan sausage roll was something that many thought would fail…

People were actually furious about its release.

An extremely British reaction (and proud).

It didn’t fail though. It was a resounding success. To the extent that many people prefer the vegan sausage rolls to the real ones.

🔑: the absolutely most important part of their strategy is the target to open 150 new stores per year…

Smash the footfall, make sure that the brand is everywhere.

I LOVE IT.

💡 The Lightbulb
Interest rate hikes make stupidity expensive

Bankers seeking protection from Greenwashing claims.

Honestly, you couldn’t make it up.

Bloomberg has run a piece today about bankers who pushed ESG debt now wanting legal protections from any Greenwashing claims that may arise!

A Reddit user summed it up nicely…

Rats fleeing ship... The banks literally knew that the money they lent was for fake greenwashing, and now they want guarantees out of lawsuits. I fucking hate these corporate bastards, both sides. Also, the article adds there is no proof where all that money went either

Shock horror: who could have predicted that the ESG agenda was mostly bullshit?

Apart from, you know, us.

Here’s Tim on ESG.

See — we can spot nonsense when we see it.

Eh?: but what even is Greenwashing?

Simple — it’s effectively lying about how environmentally an asset is.

For example, if you look at most ESG funds, they will include Toyota because woah, Toyota makes loads of Prius’.

But they are also the world’s largest manufacturer of cars generally — including 4×4s.

How exactly is a car company ESG when it comes down to the emissions, outside of some arbitrary score imposed by fund managers and the new industry of ESG ratings agencies.

Opacity: just like in 2008, there’s some conflict of interest too.

From Bloomberg Law…

Last year, a Harvard study found that “the more information a company discloses about its ESG practices, the more rating agencies disagree on how well that company is performing along these dimensions.” An MIT Sloan School of Management paper found that ESG ratings “diverge substantially” and called information from ESG ratings providers “noisy.”

So clearly, a company is incentivised to disclose as little as possible about how ESG it is to ensure a higher rating on aggregate!

And yet, we are supposed to believe that ESG wasn’t an industry created to simply generate fees from the uninformed who couldn’t be bothered to look at the composition of their pension or fund they’re invested in?

No way — that’s not like bankers! 😉

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