All-Star
weekend in basketball is over and, thanks largely to Zach Levine, it didn’t totally suck;
of course, there were still some perceived flaws. The biggest flaw revolves
around All-Star snubs. Yes, Damian Lillard is an All-Star, through both a
literal definition and an arbitrary one. His exclusion on the original coach’s
roster had Oregon citizens rioting on Burnside, tipping over food carts in a
gluten-induced rage, and writing
strongly worded poems to the NBA. Ignoring
that only one of those reactions is factually based; Blazer fans had every
right to be upset about Lillard not being initially included on the All-Star
team. Every year a player, who's left off the All-Star roster, could make his case of
why he should be an All-Star, and usually they would be right. Why? Well it
largely has to do with the unprecedented amount of talent in the league right
now, especially in the Western Conference.
Josh
Brown, over at The Reformed Broker, tackles why active management has fallen
off a cliff lately. The causes serve as an incredible parallel to the All-Star
game condition, emphasis always mine:
This is the “Paradox of Skill”
theory that Michael Mauboussin has written at length about – wherein it is only relative
skill, not absolute skill,
that matters. Ted Williams was one of only seven Major League Baseball players
ever to bat over .400 for a full season – and he did it back in 1941, more
than 70 years ago. No one’s been able to do it since because all
of the players have gotten so much better. In the stock selection
game, luck plays an increasing role because, relatively speaking, there is so
much more talented competition and
everyone is highly skilled. Larry explains that in the stock market, as in
baseball, “as average skill skill increases, it becomes more difficult to
outperform by large margins – the standard deviations of outcomes narrows.”
Back
to basketball: The West’s hand picked backcourt before Lillard's inclusion, was the
league’s leading scorer (James Harden), the league’s third leading scorer &
eventual All-Star MVP (Russell Westbrook), a guy basically averaging a double-double every time he steps on the floor (Chris Paul), and the league’s tenth
leading scorer, who is having a breakout season (Klay Thompson). Pretty safe to
assume Lillard’s original snub amounted to an enormous heaping of bad luck, and
his subsequent addition a dollop of good luck, but bad luck for Blake Griffin
(let’s be clear). I know, all this luck is very hard to keep track of, but,
that’s kinda the point.
With
the removal of mediocre in active investing, just like in basketball, it is
increasingly difficult to have sustainable dominance. Injuries are the
unforeseeable risks players have to cope with, just like macro-economic shocks
are the perils investor's dance with daily.
“Hey
teacher, teacher, tell me how do you respond to students? And refresh the page
and restart the memory?” - Kanye West Dark
Fantasy
First
off, you oust this clown:
Second,
you don’t provoke this question: “You
ain’t got no mobile in your business model?”
Good,
we straight. Now that Microsoft is willing to share their Office suite with the
rest of the class, they can get down to business. Here is Ben Thompson (I bold
with so much emphasis):
“Before today, though, Office
was disadvantaged in two ways: first, the productivity applications couldn’t
fully partake in this new modularity because they weren’t well tied-in to other
services. Secondly, though, and most importantly, this limitation meant the
mobile experience just wasn’t as good as it could be. And to not be good at mobile is to not be good period.”
Hallelujah!
Like, before this week the definition of low-hanging fruit was literally (by
which I mean figuratively) a picture of Microsoft leveraging their applications
across a wide array of mobile experiences.
Couple
that with an aggressive
acquisition campaign and Microsoft just might be turning the corner of
relevance in the market that matters.
Peace.
Follow
Wesley Vaughan @backpackbanker
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