Charlie Songhurst

One is it's so boring, no one ever bothers to seize it.

So if you look at people that were in a country on the wrong side of a war and occupied by an invading power over the last thousand years, things like houses and artworks were confiscated, things like businesses were nationalized.

No one ever thought about forestry.

It just sort of slid under the radar.

And then the second interesting attribute of it was that the cash flow characteristics are so terrible, you have to wait 50 years for trees to grow.

You've got very few investors and very few corporations doing it.

Because imagine building an Excel model showing a payback in 51 years that's really sort of only 2% to 3% of your principal.

It's so appalling, you never go into it.

And therefore, it had these characteristics that really did work superbly well.

It's sort of interesting to think, what are the digital equivalents of things that have some psychological repellents to them and therefore actually will have great economic capture because there's something unappealing about them?

I think certainly up until 2017, crypto had that.

It was such a strange topic.

The association with things like Mt.

Gox and Ford and things just made it slightly sketchy.

And then the abstraction, the lack of physical reality of it, I think makes it unintuitive to people.

You can't touch it.

You can't feel it.

It's sort of numbers in the sky.

Things like that just don't have psychological appeal.

And that absence of psychological appeal is a source of alpha.