I haven't had more than about 10 minutes to process this so I don't have a ton to say, but... Am I the only person who didn't know that most self storage facilities in the us are actually just giant real estate investment trusts? I have had a long-running joke with my brother (we come from a long line of hoarders) about quitting our jobs to open up a self-storage facility.

Aside from shattering all my dreams, I'm disappointed that using a REIT to finance this sort of endeavor had never even crossed my mind. I mean, it makes total sense. The capital structure a REIT provides (readily accessible, dirt-cheap debt) gives them one hell of a competitive advantage over any sort of mom-n-pop organization. Sorry, bro.

Throw an ice cube into the beginning of a class iv+ stretch of river. Now, write an algorithm that predicts (in real time) the magnitude and direction of every movement of said ice cube. Now, apply that algorithm to a bucket of randomly sized ice chunks and apply a transformation to each movement that represents taxes, fees, etc. and accounts for real-world issues like network hops and liquidity.

Or, you know, give up on that and write an equation that outsmarts the other guy's equation.

Of course, I haven't spent enough time on this to know what I'm talking about (I've found that once I reach a level of competence on a topic I wouldn't dare blog about it because I realize how little I actually know about that topic) but it is fun to think about and yep, this is what I've been thinking about lately.

There has been a lot of talk about unicorns lately, or, at least, I'm getting a nice Baader-Meinhof phenomenon for unicorns. At any rate, I think Aswath nicely illustrates some fuckery that can be done in valuation during an up round. It is nicely explained here:

http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2015/06/billion-dollar-tech-babies-blessing-of.html

And then there is this analysis of biotech unicorns and the idea that maybe it is better to invest in a basket rather than one:

http://mebfaber.com/2015/06/17/would-you-rather-own-the-unicorns-or-facebook/

In that article there is a link to a slideshare that, in fact comes from a bennedict evans post. You might as well check that out, too:

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/6/15/us-tech-funding

fascinating stuff.