Month: August 2019

TLDR: When fractional shares (revenue by product, market shares by company, or similar quantities) are ranked and grouped in buckets, any ratio of successive bucket means >0.5 is suspect. ————– Listening to this interview with John Hempton reminded me of his forensic scepticism about the following pie chart, taken from an investor presentation about the pharma company Valeant. John wrote (in 2014, when … Read more

(lightly revised 13 July 2025, Gompertz appendix added 17 November 2025) This article by the investor Claire Barnes of Apollo Investment Management highlights an interesting property of compound growth at a fixed percentage rate, in any quantity which forms part of a finite whole. In summary, the point is this. Suppose urban land area + rural … Read more