The important thing is not to stop questioning.- Albert Einstein
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A Futures Site Coming to Bet on Movie Ticket Sales (nytimes.com)
Weather forecasting. (parkparadigm.com)
I’ve been avoiding putting together a list of predictions for 2010 (more on that later) but just couldn’t resist suggesting that 2010 could well be a breakout year for weather risk management. All of the conditions necessary have finally started to come together and with the worst of the 2008/2009 hysteria behind us (without passing judgement on the future direction of markets), companies (and hopefully individuals) will start to wake up and respond to the risks and opportunities inherent in weather variability. I wouldn’t be surprised if weather risk was one of the top three risks faced by the vast majority of (non-financial) corporations, perhaps even the most important risk in some cases, and of the same order of magnitude as liquidity, foreign exchange, commodity and interest rate risk – all risk categories for which massive global markets in risk pricing and transfer exist. Weather in this regard remains significantly underdeveloped:
(via Ben Smith, First Enercast Financial) For example the Department of Commerce estimates that more than $1 trillion of U.S. economic activity is exposed to weather. Even if a small fraction of new risk is hedged through derivative contracts, 2010 will be a very good year for these markets.
The massive costs incurred in much of the northern hemisphere over the last few weeks due to heavy snowfalls and cold temperatures are just one more example of how important a factor in economic outcomes weather risk can be. For example, just take the exceptional – and uninsured – costs incurred by local authorities and airport operators across the UK for snow removal, sanding, salting, loss of revenues, etc. Previously, a manager of a company (or government entity) who suffered an exceptional weather-related loss could shrug their shoulders and plausibly say “it was out of my hands.” In a way that would be impossible if for example their organization suffered a massive loss because their buildings or equipment perished in a fire and they were not insured. In that scenario, shareholders or taxpayers would be incandescent with rage at the incompetent risk management of the managers. Not managing weather risks is no different in substance (now that appropriate weather insurance and derivatives are increasingly widely available), only remaining so in perception as awareness lags.
Of course I am biased, having invested in Weatherbill, which is at the vanguard of transforming weather risk markets:
(via J. Scott Mathews, WeatherEX LLC) The weather market was built upside down, which is quite a feat, even for financial engineers. What we mean is that it started on the wholesale level without any retail underpinnings. It started out like a castle in the air…The changes coming in 2010 for the weather derivative market will be keyed “from the bottom up.” Solutions companies such as Guaranteed Weather and Weatherbill who bring management choices to “ground level” risk holders are helping to complete a strong base to keep that castle from crashing on us.
The difference between weather derivatives (Weatherbill.com) (or any other new risk management tool) and say books (Amazon.com) is that risk management tools need to be ‘sold’ – there is a learning curve, however shallow; and while most people instinctively understand and can conceptualize their weather risks, their survival instincts – honed by decades of doing business with rapacious financial services firms – and fear of ‘getting their eyes ripped out’ means that they are understandably cautious when considering using weather risk management instruments for the first time.
This is where Weatherbill’s business model I think is particularly well adapted to the opportunity: on the one hand, they have a very modern (open) approach to pricing: anyone can go to their website and play around in their pricing ‘sandbox’. Try doing that ten years ago when you wanted to price up a complex FX or interest rate option. Basically it was build your own model or keep sending pricing request to your favorite sales person (who would then have to go beg the trader for a price, and in addition to the regular parameters, the client’s identity, the salesperson and the trader’s mood would also be imputed into the price. That is of course if he felt like making one.) On the other hand, (and this is something that has evolved over the past couple years) Weatherbill has aggressively sought out distribution partners – insurance brokers, industry platforms (eg travel sites), etc. – as trusted providers to their respective customer bases, they are ideally positioned to help their customers manage their weather risks by leveraging Weatherbill’s platform. I first wrote about this a few months ago, and since then they have signed up a number of new and significant partners.
I love skiing and my family take a season pass at Les Trois Vallees. Obviously weather risk is central to running or enjoying a ski resort. While there are many different types of risk you could look at in the context of a ski resort, in the interests of simplicity (ease of understanding/customer acceptance) and maximum pain relief, there are two risks that I would have loved to have had an embedded hedge for in our season ticket (and I suspect the same would go for someone buying a week-long pass for their holiday, in fact they would probably be even more sensitive/appreciative.)
Using Weatherbill to hedge their risk, Les Trois Vallees could offer a ski-pass that reimbursed me for every rainy day and for every day say less than 80% of their runs were open due to lack of snow. In an age of increasing climate uncertainty (or perception thereof) I am 100% certain this would help them market (and sell more) season tickets. And for week-long tickets, it would be a great marketing tool for advance sales (with significantly positive cashflow benefits), and great for improving the user experience. Imagine a vacationer whose week in the Alps is ruined by 5 days of torrential rain…getting their money back on the lift tickets (irrespective of whether or not they braved the elements) would go a very long way to having them consider giving it another try next year.
Of course this is but one example, I’m sure all of you can think of hundreds more. In fact it might be harder to think of services or businesses that are completely immune to the weather. So really, what are you waiting for? Start hedging!
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Had planned to do this mid-year but totally forgot. If you recall on December 31st, 2009 I made a few macro trading predictions for 2009, so far so good although I haven’t done as well as I should have despite getting things mostly right.
So, where do we go from here? I know it’s not very exciting, but I suspect we go mainly sideways in most asset markets between now and year end. If you are holding the positions above, I would continue to run them but tighten stops and look to take profits if S&P approaches 1100, Oil gets above $85 and GBP re-tests it’s August highs vs USD or EUR. Would be more patient or less nervous with positions in corporate bonds and Brazil; although both would probably suffer in a generalized market sell-off, I’d be more inclined to add on dips. Generally, I think it’s not a bad time to be raising cash again and sitting on the sidelines waiting for a better opportunity to come in: choppy sideways – which is more or less what I expect – is a very dangerous market to trade unless you are doing it full time (in which case it can be profitable and fun.) My biggest regret? Not buying AMZN when it traded below $50 like I swore I would. Have raised to $60 but not too hopeful. Otherwise I’m pretty happy with how my portfolio weathered the financial hurricane of ’08/09. Learning? Don’t overtrade: fastest way not only to lose money, but also your sanity.
(Self-)Report card: Predictions A, Trading C+, Overall B- Trading is always harder than predicting.
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The always interesting Bill St. Arnaud pointed me in the direction of this interesting speech by Jeremy Rifkin who talks about the convergence of a quantum advance in communication and energy technologies leading to a “third industrial revolution”. Clearly talk of the “smart grid” is not new and we may actually be well on our way to the “peak of inflated expectations” but this does not take away from the much much bigger picture that this convergence will be fundamentally transformational:
The same design principles and smart technologies that made possible the internet, and vast distributed global communication networks, will be used to reconfigure the world’s power grids so that people can produce renewable energy and share it peer-to-peer, just like they now produce and share information, creating a new, decentralized form of energy use. We need to envision a future in which millions of individual players can collect, produce and store locally generated renewable energy in their homes, offices, factories, and vehicles, and share their power generation with each other across a Europe-wide intelligent intergri
And although it is probably too early for us, I am extremely optimistic about the very exciting investment opportunities I see coming down the pipe because of this revolution. No we aren’t planning to add to or change the investment focus of Nauiokas Park to green tech or clean energy. What I am alluding to is the opportunities that will emerge to create new markets, market structures and participants when the world’s energy becomes a truly networked, digital commodity. Imagine a world (not so many years away) where tools like Google PowerMeter are as widely adopted as Google Search or Skype. And distributed micro-generation (solar, wind, micro-generators, etc.) and micro-storage. All connected, all digitized. Generating vast amounts of data and transactions. And you’ve got yourself a market. Sure, I here you say, energy markets already exist and by the way are pretty big. No big deal here, move along. Well, it’s not perfect but I would suggest comparing the financial markets of the 1970s to the financial markets of today, to get a sense of the quanta of change we should expect in energy markets – with the concomitant risks and opportunities this will present. And I suspect it will all happen a bit more quickly: one decade instead of three(?)
I hope we’ll have the opportunity to invest in the Weatherbill of power markets. Or the Aleri of power trading. Oh wait – we’d better hurry(!): “Home Energy Programs Getting Smarter With Software”
I know it’s not the done thing, but despite all the doom and gloom I can’t help but to get more optimistic every day about all the truly exciting opportunities that are bubbling up in harmony with the new industrial and economic paradigm that is dawning. (Which is not to disagree with the doom and gloom – for those people, companies and industries stuck in the old paradigm there isn’t much to cheer about, and it must be especially galling for those who were leaders in this old world order.)
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A couple years ago I saw a great presentation (on climate change and business) that pointed out that while in every other country in the world ‘sex’ was the most common search term on Google, in the United Kingdom it was ‘weather’. And ‘property’ isn’t far behind (source: Google Trends):
(compare to results for ‘All Regions’:)
So you can understand why we invested in Weatherbill and Zoopla… (There were a few other considerations as well, but this makes for a more fun story.)
So where was I…? Oh, that’s right, I just wanted to draw attention to Zoopla’s nifty new property value widgets and what a great addition they would make to any website targeting a British audience. The great thing is that it’s not just UK or England or even London prices you can track but areas and postcodes. Local is the new global. (Or something like that.) Write a blog for hedge fund managers? Keep the readers coming back with a nifty NW8 price tracking widget for example:
Or appeal to their bonus envy with this cheeky London Dream Homes listings widget:
I’d be willing to bet it has more pulling power than showing the latest price on the FTSE100 index…
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Intel changed the paradigm of how microprocessors were sold with their 1991 “Intel Inside” campaign:
A second issue was that the processor, although a key component of personal computers, was only a component. To effectively market this component to the PC buyer it was important to work with the manufacturer of computers. After all, the processor was buried deep inside the computer and despite its significance it was hard to tell which processor the PC contained before it was purchased.
Carter and his team studied successful consumer marketing techniques and examined tactics used by well-known companies supplying a component or ingredient of a finished product, like NutraSweet™, Teflon™ and Dolby™. They also began a variety of marketing experiments and soon began envisioning how a branded ingredient program would play out in the computer industry.
Key to this strategy was gaining consumer’s confidence in Intel as a brand and demonstrating the value of buying a microprocessor from the industry’s leading company, the pioneer of the microprocessor. At the suggestion of its advertising agency, Dahlin Smith and White, Intel adopted a new tag line for their advertising: “Intel. The computer inside.” Using this to position the important role of the processor and at the same time associating Intel with “safety,” “leading technology” and “reliability,” the company’s following-and consumer confidence-would hopefully soar. That would create a new “pull” for Intel-based PCs. Later, this tagline was shortened to “Intel Inside.”
The important role of the microprocessor was being communicated, but to be truly effective the ingredient status of the microprocessor needed to be dealt with. In 1991 Carter launched the Intel Inside® coop marketing program. The heart of the program was an incentive-based cooperative advertising program. Intel would create a co-op fund where it would take a percentage of the purchase price of processors and put it in a pool for advertising funds. Available to all computer makers, it offered to cooperatively share advertising costs for PC print ads that included the Intel logo. The benefits were clear. Adding the Intel logo not only made the OEM’s advertising dollar stretch farther, but it also conveyed an assurance that their systems were powered by the latest technology. The program launched in July 1991. By the end of that year, 300 PC OEMs had signed on to support the program.
The PC business ultimately was redefined by this – moving to a barbell of high volume commoditized assemblers/distributors (Dell) and high value specialist niche players (Alienware) and of course the fully integrated hardware/software approach of Apple. The same thing will happen in financial services over the next 10-20 years. Only the ‘Intel inside’ isn’t hardware (except maybe for some high end high frequency trading applications where I think you’ll see people starting to design and sell custom chipsets…) but financial widget providers. FaaS or Haas or RMaaS. (For the few remaining bankers that read my blog and are scratching their heads, these are not tickers or Bloomberg functions – or if they are that’s not what I’m referring to – but acronyms for Finance or Hedging or Risk Management ‘as a Service’…) These will in turn get mashed up by enterprising distributors and channel managers to offer all sort of customer (from the head to the tail) the package of financial services and products that is right for them. This is what the mega-fauna of global finance (retail, commercial and investment banks in particular but also life and property insurance companies, brokers, asset managers, etc.) do now, in house, although the concept of “open architecture” on a fund management platform for example is a sort of distant evolutionary predecessor.
A more apt existing business model along these lines – that practitioners in the retail trading and FX markets will be particularly familiar with – is white labeling. Indeed companies like Saxo Bank have done extremely well with very sophisticated and industrialized white label partnership programs. You want to offer your customers trading on FX, FX Options, Forwards, Spot Gold & Silver, CFDs, Stocks, Futures, etc? Just plug into their machine and you’ve got yourself a trading engine and infrastructure. You want to offer your customers weather insurance? No problem – just grab Weatherbill’s new white label solution:
The WeatherBill White Label platform enables any third party to offer weather coverage to their clients, written on their paper, and using their distribution channels. It is an innovative end-to-end technology platform for pricing, transacting, settling, and managing weather risk. WeatherBill White Label creates new revenue streams and growth opportunities for insurance companies and weather derivative dealers, allowing them to leverage WeatherBill’s technology to offer fully automated, customizable weather coverage to their clients.
For any company who has customers that could use weather insurance in the context of their relationship with this company, this would seem to be a no-brainer; you don’t need to re-invent the wheel, weather algorithms and derivatives processing are probably not your core business and/or is not where you want to deploy resources. Outsource it. Add a plug-in. Did you write your own mapping software to show where your offices are on your ‘Contact Us’ page? No, you used Google or Multimap etc. and integrated it into your site and/or your service. It’s as simple as that, and makes just as much sense.
Financial mash-ups and FaaS. It’s just the start…
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It will come as no shock to most readers that I think one of the key opportunities of the next decade or so is to harness the possibilities unlocked by the advances in ICT – most notably the continuing march towards a ubiquitous, high-speed internet – to vastly lower transaction costs and enable robust, distributed marketplaces to emerge in sectors and activities where heretofore the (informational and transactional) costs of organizing such a market would have been prohibitive. While it is certainly an oversimplification, I think such opportunities can be broadly categorized into two groups:
Putting my money where my mouth is, I’ve taken the opportunity to invest in two exciting start-ups that fall into this second group: last year in seedcamp ’07 winner MyBuilder.com and just now in (seedcamp ’07 finalist) School of Everything. Both have passionate, energetic and visionary founders that have been able to translate their ideas into robust and well-executed platforms for organizing and ‘trading’ specialist services. As for any pioneering start-up, neither can be sure of success, however the combination of a fundamentally sound idea, in harmony with the inevitable secular change in how economic activity will be organized in a networked world, married to a strong committed team is as good a place as any to start. 
I must admit in the case of SoE, part of my motivation to invest was driven by a more emotional and/or intellectual interest in what they have set out to do:
Our current education system was designed in the industrial revolution to prepare people for factory work. The world has changed a lot since then – and the time has come to rethink education from the bottom to the top.
At School of Everything, we believe that learning is personal, and starts not with what you ‘should’ learn but with what you’re interested in. So we’re building a tool to help anyone in the world learn everything, and teach anything, how and when suits them – by putting people in touch with each other, not with institutions.
Not only is education and learning the lifeblood of our modern economy and an important social good, but by creating a marketplace for people to ‘distribute’ and acquire skills and knowledge, SoE is providing another very useful output for harnessing what Clay Shirky has identified as society’s “cognitive surplus.”
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.
The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we’re still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.
The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you’re going. That’s the phase we’re in now.
So if there is something you’ve always wanted to learn, or something you’d love to teach to others, School of Everything is a pretty good place to start. I wonder if anyone is giving courses on how to run a bank…you’d think demand for that might be pretty high these days… 
Given these tough economic times I suspect that SoE is even more useful, whether it’s to learn a new skill to keep an existing job (or find a new one) or to earn a bit of money and/or social capital by teaching if you’ve suffered the misfortune of losing your job or are working reduced hours.
In any event, I’m very excited to become a small part of this and congratulate Paul and his team on this follow-on funding and wish them great success in building SoE into a wonderful global marketplace for learning.
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Ok full disclosure: I just totally made up the silly marketing claim in the headline…but the good folks at Weatherbill have just launched a new, sexier, easier to navigate website. Check it out and please send them feedback – the good, but especially the bad and ugly – either in the comments here or on their blog.
I’m going to miss the farmer though…we hardly knew him at all.
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Was cleaning up my inbox earlier today and this interesting promotional offer caught my eye:
Flybe’s website goes on:
This year we wanted to go one step further to give you extra peace of mind. We will give passengers who book flights, car hire and hotels direct* with Flybe in January 2009 free of charge travel cancellation cover in the event of redundancy prior to travel. Offer excludes the self employed and those who have had less than 2 years continuous employment and who do not qualify for statutory redundancy pay as per Statutory Redundancy legislation.
It seemed potentially interesting as yet another example of risk management tools being given to consumers. So I thought it would be interesting to look at the fine print…
Ignoring the irony that the policy backing up this offer is underwritten by AIG UK Limited…I was pretty disappointed (but not surprised) by what I found. Firstly, you are only paid if you cancel your trip. This is totally lame. If you lose your job, you’ll likely be more inclined to take the holiday/family visit/etc. you have booked. Further I’m not sure everyone will realize they only get reimbursed if they cancel, (even though to be fair to flybe they make it clear that it is cancellation coverage…)
On the other hand, I guess if it were true redundancy insurance, you might have a serious adverse selection problem (and AIG would charge more?) even though the terms state that “at the time of booking your trip, you had no reason to believe that you would be made redundant” (does that exclude then everyone who works for a bank? or for AIG UK?)
Anyhow while this particular offer is more gimmick than substance (as opposed to the iTravel Let it Snow promotion underwritten by Weatherbill for example), I think it is indicative of a growing trend to providing consumers with granular risk management tools.
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As you may recall, a couple months ago Weatherbill announced a partnership with Priceline, underwriting a promotion they ran that would reimburse the cost of your holiday package if it rained more than half the days during your stay.
It’s always important to put theory to the test and so I was happy to see that the promotion seems to be a success:
In June, 12% of Priceline’s site traffic clicked on a promotion. While the Sunshine Guarantee promotion may attract only a niche audience (0.2% of Priceline shoppers), those who do click on this promotion are highly likely to convert – an impressive 24% of Sunshine clickers will complete a booking. Despite attracting relatively few clickers, it resonated with its audience and led to strong conversion rates, showing just how effective a smaller, targeted promotion can be.
I’m sure we’ll see more and more of these sorts of embedded derivatives in weather-sensitive consumer products. While you may go to the time and effort of directly hedging your wedding, the average person – even if they were aware of an easy-to-use product like Weatherbill – probably will be too busy/apathetic/forgetful to hedge something smaller – like a day out golfing. But embed the coverage into the product (or at least make it as easy as ticking a box) and I think demand will be very high. The days of “NO RAIN CHECKS” are surely soon behind us…
An eclectic collection of things I’m reading, looking at or thinking about. 