Companies can grow faster than their leaders can gain leadership experience; a Great Filter.

Loans fall due and must be repaid, rolled over, or in the extreme, defaulted on.

All marketplaces are all unique. But all successful marketplaces are unique in the same way: they liberate an inefficiently used fixed asset.

There is an idea in finance so simple, so intuitive, that its destructive power is not immediately obvious and often goes unnoticed - it may be the most dangerous concept in finance for investors.

The first billion is the hardest. Apparently.

The general Erwin Rommel, popularly known as the Desert Fox and known only (probably) to his mum by his birth name little Eugen, was about as distinguished as generals come during WWII. Best known as a tank commander, Rommel was both a great military strategist, and a master tactician. A key to his success was being able to identify the difference between a risk, and a gamble.

Money is made at chokepoints, and the most valuable chokepoints are operating systems; Amazon has built exactly that with Alexa.

Reality could be described as a series of limitations on every living thing, the final boundary being death. In other words, we have only so much energy to expend before we tire; only so much in the way of food and resources available to us; our skills and capacities can go only so far - these things are inherently finite.

Hana Masako’s life was unremarkable. She was an orphan, never married and had no children. After her final year of high school, she began working as a personal assistant – a role she kept for over 50 years. In life, Hana revealed little to the world; but her death uncovered something extraordinary.

A man stood in Glenmont metro station. For a few moments he exhaled into his hands, each a closed fist, and then proceed to take up a violin and fill the Washington DC terminal with the sounds of Bach – half a dozen pieces in total.

By the end of the 1930’s, Walt Disney’s humble studio had sketched over 400 cartoons – most of them adored by their viewers, and most of them losing money. Disney had been bankrupted before, and with the incredibly high cost of cartoon production and onerous finance available at the time, a second and tectonic failure looked certain.

“Mansions and yachts, as long as a city blocks.” This is my favourite quote from one of the Mega Millions jackpot winners when asked about what the spoils were going to be spent on. The US$1.5bn draw recently won by an anonymous South Carolinian is basically the biggest win ever of its kind, and at one point in the lead up, some US states were selling up to 600 lottery tickets per second.

Could Satoshi Nakamoto have conceived – in his wildest of dreams – that a nine-page manifesto, “The Bitcoin” was going to make him (or her – Satoshi’s true identity is yet to be revealed) a multi-billionaire and kick-off an unconscionable energy-swallowing behemoth.

February 5th of this year was a miserable day for some. Anyone long the XIV (otherwise known as the VelocityShares Daily Inverse VIX Short Term ETN) would have had the unpleasant experience of watching their capital evaporate following a spectacular after-hours selloff.

While bitcoin has lost two-thirds of its value since its December zenith, fervour for the tempestuous little digital nuggets remains strong; at least according to volumes traded on Singapore-based exchange BitForex, which regularly sees daily transaction volumes above US$5 billion. Five-billon! That’s a figure approaching the average turnover of all trades on the London Stock Exchange.

As gathering financial storm clouds roil currencies, credit and equities in the formerly-designated “third world”, a trio of Latin American countries will confront the prospect of major political change in coming months.

Calamitous (a more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering) is probably too strong a word for the peer-to-peer lending sector in China – but not far off. The summer has been particularly gruelling for peer-to-peer lending companies in China. The Peterson Institute recently reported that total outstanding loans in the industry collapsed to less than RMB 1 trillion in July from 1.3 trillion a month before, and many lending platforms have run into serious trouble since the beginning of June.

Two words that generally usher in equal parts relief and celebration – with that utterance, Elon Musk brought his purported plan to take Tesla private to a new level.

To the last crypto bull: please turn off the lights on your way out.

L. Ron Hubbard once quipped (before he founded the church of Scientology) that ‘if a man wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.’ Tesla is most definitely not registered as a 501(c), but if it was it might explain some things – or at least make it easier to understand.