FNF #3
By Handzalah / Black Swan Research 17 August 2026, 3:55am MYT
Topics discussed in tonight’s FNF:
- Freedom of trade
- Framework for American democracy
- Capitalism fuels negative behavior since the focus of the society is attach solely to monetary benefits
- Zakat as a means to reset the negative effects of capitalism
- One theory that a society will move towards a future with aa individualistic unified vision of how society should run be it capitalism or more socialist society
- The theory on unified vision leading to success of capitalism was countered by a member, saying that capitalism rose on popularity due to “survival of the fittest”
- The increase of immigration has contaminated borders’ unified vision
- Disagreement on how communism was viewed by Marx
- Dan Xiaoping’s adjusted view of communism added some capitalistic traits and policies in order to create sustainable economy
- Argument of whether immigration is a net positive or net negative
- 3 factors of immigration includes, volume, speed, and location
- Example of forced integration is Malaysia by having 3 distinct ethnicities
- Negative trait of immigration is that a migrant worker from a country may form group of their own kind in the country they work. This discourages the migrant to assimilate or integrate with the broader country and its people. This causes a division within the country’s borders.
- Humans have a natural tendency to stick around their own people
- A question raised on what would be a better living standard based solely on economic benefit and welfare
1) High tax countries with high welfare programs for expats, Finland
2) Zero taxes but no welfare programs for expats, Saudi Arabia
3) Middle tax but no welfare programs for expats (however because Malaysia is some of the members’ nationality we do benefit from having welfare program) , Malaysia - A discussion on how durable companies like Logitech are when faced against Chinese manufacturers
- The more casual gamer may not care too much in the small detail in performance therefore they will likely purchase the most reputable brand such as Logitech and Razer
- Casual gamers make up most of the gamer market
- Marx’s theory of alienation
- Commoditized businesses like Bumi Resources, Indonesian mining company has very low competitive advantages they can use to fend of competitors from eating their share of the profit pie
- In commoditized businesses one strong competitive advantage is if you are the lowest cost producer, it may be the only economic moat for mining companies
- Gravity of capitalism described as the natural force that when one business achieves returns in excess of its cost of capital, it will introduce new entrants that will drive the excess returns down
- Focus Point opened a new retail in Johor with the newly introduced ‘Focus Point Prestige” which is their highest end retail experience
- Indonesian Stock Exchange (IDX) is now pursuing demutualization to enforce stricter regulation
- IDX was re-rated by MSCI causing a market sell-off
- London Stock Exchange (LSE) and New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) both demutualized at 2000 and 2006 respectively
- LSE and NYSE as a result got a re-rating for their exchanges
- TTD (The Trade Desk) is a demand side platform (DSP) for advertisements in the open interenet
- TTD focuses on demand side because it is more economical given that their is large supply of ad space (supply side) but there is limited buyers of ad space (demand side)
- Open internet vs walled gardens (Meta & Alphabet)
- Future of ad spend in TV, shift away from traditional TVs to connected TVs (CTVs)
- CTV expected to drive TTD’s revenues as people shift from traditional TVs
- However, CTVs will likely have most of its ad spend be via negotiated ads and smaller portion of ad spend on programmatic ads
- Risk of Netflix being a walled garden itself which will drive down TTD’s potential revenues