Fat Tailed Thoughts

Headlines run every day with advice on "How to Win at Retirement Savings" and "10 Tips to Save Money." What most people don't know is that 89 million Americans have debt in collections.

Collections is industry built on abusing consumers. Over 870,000 complaints are filed every year. But it doesn't have to be that way.  Startups are proving that treating people well can be good business. They're 40%+ more effective at collections that the legacy dial-for-dollars. Not only is it more revenue, it's bigger profits and happier consumers.

We explore the state of consumer delinquent debt, the misaligned incentives in debt collections, and the startups that are helping millions of consumers. Shoutouts to startups InDebted, Prodigal, receeve, and TrueAccord!

Check out this week's letter for the full story. Follow @FatTailThoughts on Twitter and your co-hosts @KleeBeard and @StevenDickens3 for more content.

The adult industry is bigger than Hollywood yet it largely lacks access to basic financial services. Cutoff from banking, payments, and venture capital, it is remarkable the industry exists at all.

Some sub-segments have earned their reputations as high-risk. But sexual wellness has not. It's a $10B+ industry cutoff from financial services despite being low-risk and highly profitable. It's an extraordinary failure.

We explore why the adult industry hasn't had access to financial services and the barriers still left to overcome today. We find that the industry is changing - the barriers are falling. Dame, Mauve, Hello Cake, and Foria have overcome tremendous odds to build promising startups. Lerer Hippeau, RRE, and a select few other venture capitalists are starting to provide funding.

It's never been a better time to fund and build sexual wellness.

Check out this week's letter for the full story. Follow @FatTailThoughts on Twitter and your co-hosts @KleeBeard and @StevenDickens3 for more content.

Decades long technology revolutions can be multibillion dollar opportunities for those paying attention.

Yesterday's hype can take years to become mainstream. Even longer if you're a highly regulated financial services company.

We explore why only 8% of banking tasks have been moved to the cloud and how even these first steps have unlocked slow revolutions in equity markets and money movement. New capabilities are just coming online today that have been years in the making. They're massive opportunities for those paying attention.

Check out this week's letter for the full story. Follow @FatTailThoughts on Twitter and your co-hosts @KleeBeard and @StevenDickens3 for more content.

Happy New Year! We're kicking off with our top 10 predictions for 2022!

Our top 10: 1. metaverse, 2. inflation, 3. globalization, 4. semi conductors, 5. nuclear energy, 6. payment rails, 7. digitization of paper, 8. NFTs, 9. regulation in crypto markets, and 10. central bank digital currencies.

One host bets on change - innovation accelerating across a broad range of industries. The other host bets on life moving more slowly - optimistic for the long term, but a more incremental rate of change.

Follow @FatTailThoughts on Twitter and your co-hosts @KleeBeard and @StevenDickens3 for more content.

Hyperinflation is real - prices increasing at least 40% per month. Our recent bout of inflation isn't anywhere in the ballpark. What we're dealing with isn't hyperinflation. It's hyped inflation. But inflation expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

We explore why a coin flipping monkey is preferable to inflation forecasters, complex adaptive systems, and how inflation expectations can become reality. Will Bitcoin ever challenge displace traditional fiat money? We debate the merits and look to history as a guide.

Check out this week's letter for the full story. Follow @FatTailThoughts on Twitter and your co-hosts @KleeBeard and @StevenDickens3 for more content.

Prices are going up, but by how much? Is the government squashing the truth?

We unpack the methodology behind the government reported Consumer Price Index (CPI) and explore sources of error including incentives for squashing the reported numbers. We explore why there are surprisingly few alternative inflation measures and analyze why some of the more popular ones have their own challenges.

Check out this week's letter for the full story. Follow @FatTailThoughts on Twitter and your co-hosts @KleeBeard and @StevenDickens3 for more content.

The next multibillion dollar opportunity. Digitize data trapped on paper and build a business around the data.

We explore the three billion dollar opportunities for OCR startups digitizing data: sell analytics to existing customers, sell analytics to new customers, and expand into automating near-adjacent steps in the business workflows. Or build a competing startup that eliminates paper by digitizing forms and automating processes. We balance the revenue upside with the building challenges for each of these businesses before considering how the future will unfold.

Check out this week's letter for the full story. Follow @FatTailThoughts on Twitter and your co-hosts @KleeBeard and @StevenDickens3 for more content.

Bank statements, credit card statements, and tax forms all contain valuable data, but it's trapped on paper and in PDFs. We humans recognize the ink patters them as letters, but they contain no instructions for the computer. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is how machines learn to read.

We explore the mechanics of OCR - the scale of the paper problem in financial services and why paper-based data is so difficult for computers to extract. We look at how accuracy statistics for machines can be misleading and why that results in people - lots of people - staying involved in the digitization process.

This week's conversation is a prelude to the next where we'll look at OCR startups and the tremendous business opportunities they're starting to unlock.

Check out this week's letter for the full story. Follow @FatTailThoughts on Twitter and your co-hosts @KleeBeard and @StevenDickens3 for more content.

Pundits on TV and cryptocurrency maximalists across the world regularly tout Bitcoin and crypto as "the fastest growing financial product in history." But is that actually true?

We benchmark oil, gold, stocks, and crypto to GDP and look at how they changed throughout history. From the 1901 oil strike in Texas to the gold rush of 1849, we look at both the sizes relative to GDP and the year-over-year change as a percentage of GDP.

Heads up - crypto's in a league of its own.

Check out this week's letter for the full story. Follow @FatTailThoughts on Twitter and your co-hosts @KleeBeard and @StevenDickens3 for more content.

Exchange traded funds (ETFs) part two. We discuss the hidden risks of concentrated ETF holdings in Apple and Microsoft and the exclusive club of authorized participants, most of whom had to be bailed out in the Financial Crisis. We look at the exciting new bitcoin futures ETF and explore why that succeed where previous attempts had failed, how the regulators are thinking about bitcoin ETFs, and when we can expect a bitcoin spot ETP.

Check out this week's letter for the full story. Follow @FatTailThoughts on Twitter and your co-hosts @KleeBeard and @StevenDickens3 for more content.