Bamboo Innovator Daily Insight: 18 Feb (Wed) – Vincent Van Gogh: Superstar Of The Year; Comparisons With Others Can Obscure Our Own Goals

Life

• Comparisons With Others Can Obscure Our Own Goals: NYT
• Vincent Van Gogh: Superstar Of The Year: Forbes
• Everything You Need to Know About Becoming a Better Listener: HBR
• The Mistake Companies Make When Marketing to Different Cultures: HBR
• Experts Brainstorm Ways to Fund Cities to Withstand Disasters: JG
• How to Find a Best Friend; It is harder for children to form lasting friendships; rising screen time and lots of activities get in the way: WSJ
• Unfriendly Persuasion by CFOs Could Spur Faulty Audits; Caught between the need to serve clients and the requirement to be skeptical of them, auditors may stint on audit quality. CFO

Investing Process

• How to Tell if a CEO Is Lying: A new approach to financial analysis measures executive evasion and candor to gauge a company’s outlook: II
• The “Oracle of Omaha’s” investment vehicle picked up a stake in 21st Century Fox and ditched all of its Exxon Mobil shares. Fortune

Greater China

• Hanergy’s Li taps shadow lenders to fund group’s startling growth: FT
• Western executives should speak truth to Chinese power; Better governance and greater transparency would be a good target: FT
• China’s Churning Out Billionaires Like It’s 1999: Bloomberg
• China Considering Mergers Among Its Big State Oil Companies; Beijing’s Step Back With Big Oil: Merging China’s National Oil Companies Would Be Retrograde Move: WSJ1, WSJ2
• Public corruption in China: Then and now: SCMP

India

• It’s Time for Modi to Live Up to His Promises; India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spent his first nine months in office on basic reforms, but there’ve yet to be any sweeping changes: WSJ
• Is India Really Growing Faster Than China?: WSJ

Japan & Korea

• Firing Up Japan’s Scrappy Steelmaker: WSJ

ASEAN

• Are Indonesia’s Years of Living Dangerously Over? Investors like Jokowi’s reform agenda but they shouldn’t forget the nation’s past financial missteps: Barron’s
• Half of Harley Motorcycles in Indonesia Are Said to Be Illegal: JG
• More Doubts Are Cast Over Jokowi’s Promise to Fight Corruption: JG
• Editorial: Dearth of Leadership From President Jokowi: JG
• In Indian Graft Battle, Some Lessons for Indonesia’s President; Joko Widodo may not have heard of Arvind Kejriwal at all but no doubt he would envy his position as head of his own political party: JG
• KPK vs Polri: Children of light and children of darkness: JP
• Future of NOL sinks deeper into doubt: BT

Macro

• Swiss prosecutor raids HSBC premises: FT
• DuPont Says Trian Bases Fight on ‘Myths’; CEO Kullman says Trian proxy fight ‘based on misrepresentations, inaccurate data, and flawed analyses’: WSJ
• Retirement-Account Standards May Tighten: Brokers Would Have to Put Clients’ Interests First: WSJ
• David Tepper Dumps 40% Of US Equity Exposure Despite Claiming “Stocks Inexpensive”: Zerohedge
• Emerging fund managers stuck in buy-and-hold as trading shrivels: Reuters

TMT

• Marc Andreessen’s plan for fostering more “Unicorn” startups: Pando
• It’s ‘Silicon Valley vs. Motor City’: Bloomberg
• GoPro CIO Prepares to Rein in Rogue IT: WSJ
• At GM, Internet Ordering Required a Massive Overhaul; Auto maker spent years building internal systems expertise to allow customers to shop online: WSJ
• Bosch CEO: Tech industry interlopers force car industry to react: Reuters

Energy & Commodities

• How will the oil crash affect Norway? FT
• Big Investors Make Big Bets For and Against Energy; Buffett, Soros Sell Off Exxon Mobil Stakes: WSJ
• Milking New Zealand’s Way of Life: WSJ

Consumer & Others

• Tim Hortons will become household name around the world, CEO Daniel Schwartz says: FP
• Has Coca-Cola lost its cool?: TheAge

Bamboo Innovator Daily Insight: 17 Feb (Tues) – Jony Ive carried a resignation letter in his pocket the first time he met Steve Jobs; “Fuck, you’ve not been very effective, have you?” Jobs was saying that the designs Ive had looked fresh and exciting, but Ive hadn’t been able to get the rest of the company to pay much attention to his work

Life

• Jony Ive carried a resignation letter in his pocket the first time he met Steve Jobs; “Fuck, you’ve not been very effective, have you?” Jobs was saying that the designs Ive had looked fresh and exciting, but Ive hadn’t been able to get to pay much attention to his work: BI, Newyorker
• The financial dangers of swapping common sense for risk models: FT
• Red Ocean Traps: HBR
• The art of delegation and clearing bottlenecks at the top: Forbes
• A multimillion-dollar fraudster who accumulated properties, luxury cars and a house boat has been jailed for eight years. TheAge
• Prerna Sharma: The scientist of small things: Forbes
• Light bulbs vs. the Internet; Calling for less destruction and more creation: WaPo
• Fraudulent Hedge Fund Manager Moazzam Malik Fakes Own Death: VW

Greater China

• Jack Ma Says Alibaba At ‘Most Critical Moment’ As China Starts New Investigation: Forbes
• Ambitious Chinese officials ‘setting secret traps to blackmail rivals’ to advance their own careers: SCMP
• Accounting scandal in hidden debt as Kaisa discloses much higher debt burden; Troubled Chinese developer Kaisa told foreign bond investors that it faces a $10.4bn debt load—more than double the audited amount it previously disclosed; Developer Kaisa eyes urgent restructuring of debts that now top HK$78 billion: WSJ, SCMP
• Hong Kong-Shanghai Trading Link Struggles to Connect With Investors; Rollout of China’s three-month-old Stock Connect program was too fast, fund managers say: WSJ
• China’s One Trillion Reasons to Prevent Yuan Tumbling: Bloomberg
• Concerns raised as China steel enters ‘peak zone’: FT
• Guangzhou doctors angry after inspectors search hospitals for ‘bribes’: SCMP
• How China’s political purge felled Kaisa; Confusion sparked by speed of developer’s demise: FT
• Chinese provinces turn to old investment and easing playbook: FT
• Chinese innovation: BGI’s code for success; DNA company’s fortunes hint at a new model for nation’s tech industry: FT
• Xi Takes A Gamble With Corruption Crackdown: Barron’s
• Sneak peek on China bank earnings offers worrying credit cost picture: SCMP
• What if China home prices keep falling?: SCMP
• China’s aluminium tug of war stuck in repeat mode: SCMP
• Peter Woo Kwong-ching will retire as chairman of Wharf (Holdings) to make way for a smooth transfer of control of the business empire to the next generation.: SCMP
• China’s COSCO Dis-Assembles 8 Ships Amid Glut As Baltic Dry Hits Another Record Low: Zerohedge
• Ambitious Chinese officials ‘setting secret traps to blackmail rivals’ to advance their own careers: SCMP
• Jack Ma Says Alibaba At ‘Most Critical Moment’ As China Starts New Investigation: Forbes

ASEAN

• Noble rejects improper accounting claims: FT, WSJ, BT
• Indonesian police seeking to ‘defang’ anti-graft agency: DW
• Yangon-based paper attacks Myanmar’s elite rulers, describing them as impediments to progress and harmony in society. TheAge
• Thai SEC has filed a complaint with the Department of Special Investigation against six people and three companies for allegedly falsifying accounts and committing fraud that caused unspecified damage to Thai Unique Coil (TUCC): NM
• 300 Singapore property investors found themselves in trouble after pumping US$11 million into Clara Tan’s CTL Global’s plan to buy up distressed houses in the US after attending property seminars: AsiaOne
• Are short sellers gunning for Singapore again?: CNBC

Macro

• Reform the Condominium: It’s become too much of a vehicle for financial speculation: NYT
• How the unspoken currency war threatens to be a silent killer in world markets: FP
• Chart of the day: How US$2.4tr will vanish from global growth: SCMP
• HSBC Bank: Secret Origins To Laundering The World’s Drug Money: Zerohedge
• Giant Australian construction firm Leighton Holdings faces courtroom accusations it concealed a financial black-hole worth up to $4 billion from shareholders, potentially breaching continuous disclosure laws: TheAge

TMT

• The migrant story behind thriving global tech sector; Immigrants are inherent risk-takers with an incentive to better their circumstances: FT
• At UPS, the Algorithm Is the Driver; Turn right, turn left, turn right: inside Orion, the 10-year effort to squeeze every penny from delivery routes: WSJ
• Liberty Global, Becoming a Big Fish, Risks Attracting the Eye of a Shark: NYT
• Gyde this: Aussie brothers Andrew and Scott Julian aiming for the Google of streaming video: TheAge
• Hyperloop Is Real: Meet The Startups Selling Supersonic Travel: Forbes
• SocialCops helps tackle big problems with Big data: Forbes
• How Zombies have taken over pop culture: Forbes
• Challenge of Apple Watch: Defining Its Purpose; Envisioned as a health monitor, Apple Watch provides data, communicates in new ways: WSJ

Energy & Commodities

• Time to start treating commodities as currencies?: FT

Healthcare

• Pharma Must Launch Itself Back to Full Health; Belief in improving R&D productivity needs to be justified commercially: WSJ

Consumer & Others

• Fortress Ferrero resists bankers’ siege; Nutella creator’s death sparks speculation over strategy: FT
• Edible insects: grub pioneers aim to make bugs palatable; Could insects be the next sushi and bug-burgers the new sirloin steak? Pat Crowley, founder of Chapul, which makes energy bars from finely milled crickets, hopes so: FT
• All eyes on chocolate maker Ferrero’s next generation: Reuters