where can you invest £1000

investment idea of the day

Tesla led by E Musk is going all in for EV. Tesla’s shares
stood at $278.30 beginning of April, up 30 per cent from the beginning of the
year. Its Bringing this quarter the M3, aimed at a mass market audience. the
Model 3 is expected to have a price tag of about $35,000, less than half as
expensive as the Model S sedan or the Model X crossover SUV.

BMW is putting up stiff competition and this will benefit
the technology and ultimately the consumers. As more players come in and invest
and more discussion take place customers become comfortable with things like
range anxiety.

Around half million customers have placed a £1,000 deposit
on the Model 3. Tesla expects to be in a position to produce around 5,000 Model
3 per week towards the end of this year. It’s still possible to make the
deposit toward your future M3 which is a good investment.

The Good Immigrant - book review

The good immigrant is a collection of essays crowdfunded into this book. The first impression was “I didn’t know the Chinese felt alienated” aren’t they called the model minority? Successful, assimilated, and a series of similar snapshots framing people yet book stories are more than modelling and stereotypes. Its candid glances into personal life, intimate and oozing with dreams and vulnerabilities. The book reflects experiences of immigrants with diverse background thus give you a flavour of all aspects of how minorities perceive themselves.

The book reflects the views of second generation media, publishing and performance art professionals and does not include the wider society. It concerns itself with politics and an intellectual version of identity. The truth is the UK has a long history of welcoming people from across the globe. Some of them arrived here fearing their lives and were granted stay and the welfare state held their hand to help stand on their feet. The whole picture is complex, paradoxical and wholly indeterminist galvanised by actions and reactions involving cultures, individuals, differences, institutions, businesses, weather, geography, housing and a list that I am not going to fit here. The sentiment of settlers varied depending on quality of life that relates to their education, interest in culture and enthusiasm in confronting their prejudices. A German study looking at immigrant over long term of 30 years shows that people who are enthusiastic about their new country were happier at native country than those who found immigration difficult. To reduce this to a monotone shrill is a disservice for those who have been accommodated, who have found love and acceptance.

The book would have greatly benefited from three further stories. The first two of immigrants who is first generation and dealing with a whole new range of challenges trying to find their way in bureaucracy and highly organised society with its set of invisible obstacles. Another one a tale of none media professional, an immigrant concerned with issues that are pigment blind that affect each of us and are not born of identity and taste.

Third would be an account of a White author on their experience of dealing with key real-life relationships with non-Whites when they were forced to dismantle and confront their stereotypes or when creating a non-White character or milieu, their need to exoticise and the private conflicts they face doing so. The second hand experiences they hold on minorities, their strength and roots.

In this era of cultural hype and the rejuvenated politics of identity I tend to incline toward a post racial outlook where issues that are real become a topic of identity. Mainstream media is prone to hijacking by intellectual political discourse hence removed from reality. The most prominent example is the mainstream media that is concerned with experts and intellectuals of certain type and had peeled from reality the backlash of which is the right wing or populism response. This is a mainstream book by non-whites who are the product of mainstream white culture. 

Consider investing in commodity to diversify

Commodity markets are at a turning point given the economic situation and technological S curse we inhabit. 

Something to look out for is the oil price volatility. The oil price will be revised downward by electric vehicles which will happen around 2020. timing is key but impossible to pinpoint so investments ought to take it into general consideration and plan portfolios for long term gains.

To start an oil crash you don't need to replace all fossil fuel cars with EV but just a small segment of the 1 billion cars in the world. consider the oil crash of the 2014, it was caused by pumping just 2 million extra barrels a day. it was a crash caused by supply so if electric cars displace the 2 mill plus on the demand side it should also cause a crash.

This far is common sense but when will EVs be there Tesla is going from 50 thousand last year to 500 thousands by 2020. lets assume Tesla meets its targets and other manufacturers maintain the current combined market share for EV. each electric vehicle displaces 15 barrel of oil a year and we hit our benchmark target of 2 million barrels of oil displaced a day in 2023. that is the start of the crash and the crisis will follow in the years to come.

The impact of such crisis goes behind the commodity prices and will impact stock and bonds. trillions invested in fossil energy will be lost and trillions will be invested in new energy. stocks of BP, Shell and the likes will plummet and gains will be made in renewable energy stocks such as CVA and ABY.

The estimates are conservative and doesn't take into account expansion by all manufacturers, technology improvements, investment by challengers, quantum leaps and regulatory tax breaks. All this means the future will be here sooner than you might think. 

Book Review - Outliers by Malcom Gladwill

What is in the making of personal success

It's rather ironic use of the term outlier for the title. I do recognise it as a technical term as oppose to word as it signifies a specific concept in data analysis. Outlier takes centre stage in data science, concerned with an events or phenomena that fall outside the normal pattern. The book outlier is a refreshing outlook at a time when data science not only come to dominate virtual space but most contemporary literature concern itself with a sobering study of the subject.

The book deals with the broader context of collective contribution, a concept not new at all and acknowledged and documented in the work of most geniuses such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. The book adds its twist by combining it with how the Western culture view success and its contemporary drivers. The book debunks the misconception that success is an outcome of personal achievement but rather a mix of a string of opportunities, concerted effort of communities and families, luck, dedication and a quirky take on the world.

The book is an eye opener to rigid individualism and how viewing success in those terms are not only false but dangerous. We do live at a time which offers great opportunities and unprecedented potentials but they are only few and it’s important to be aware of how we view the majority who are unsuccessful. We view our system in a sentimental way that it rewards hard work with astonishing success and wealth, this is false the truth is that it only rewards one billionaire Bill Gates and one billionaire Richard Branson and nobody else can have that opportunity and if Bill Gates was not born in 1955 plus another series of lucky events the opportunity would have gone to someone else and only them. This leaves the reader ponder about our system where the successful and rich get only richer and the poor and unsuccessful get poorer. Unable to cope with its own contradiction our policy and politics had reverted to the primitive and nasty habit of assigning blame which should have no place in modern policy. The poor and immigrants have been blamed but this didn’t bring any change and now the turmoil is spiralling out of control threatening the whole liberal system.

 

After dealing with what produces successful people the book naturally turns to understanding the role of culture, the framework that moulds us and shapes our consciousness and subconscious. Our culture gives us strength but it can also constraint us. When the Korean Airways have a record of crushes that is 17 times more than other western industrialised countries and the pattern continues over 1980s while everything else is held equal then studying the Korean culture and the social structure it imposes might contain answers. We are squeamish to do that because the way we talk about culture is unscrupulous and since most cultural ideas are ill-informed such discourse are often disparaging. East Asians continually and consistently achieve higher grades in international math scoring competitions. I'm not talking about achievement by margins but significant that can be represented by standard deviation. When all else is held equal such difference can be explained by culture which goes hundred and thousands of years back to rice cultivation. if you want the full relationship between rice and math then you should read the book.

This book makes a lot of sense to me, I know several fellow Afghans who are extremely talented, educated and driven but yet they make less money, unable to travel or take jobs they qualify while a British Citizen with below average intellect and high school dropout makes more money ( several fold), free to travel and access to diverse occupational opportunities. This modern system surely rewards other things as well beside personal stamina and talent.