Björn Jeffery

Friends, For a few years now, I have taken a special interest in how new technology phenomena affects regular financial markets. For Svenska Dagbladet, I have written about everything from the short squeeze in Gamestop to prediction markets and bitcoin treasury companies. Underpinning it all is a sense that something fundamental is changing. Why do so many choose to invest their money into these new things? What happened to saving money in a low-cost index fund?

“The investment strategy at the time was to find a replacement revenue source for its traditional print media business – which it forecast would decline in the advent of digital media” That’s a quote from an article describing Naspers, a South African media company, in the 1980s. Koos Bekker – now the Chairman – had suggested that there was potential for a new type of pay TV in South Africa, similar to HBO. The narrative is immediately familiar.

May 2015. Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL, is on CNBC. He is wearing a navy blazer, no tie, blue shirt. He’s talking fast, and in bursts of excited management speak. He has a lot to be excited about. It has just been announced that Verizon is going to buy AOL for $4.4 billion. This is of course good news for Mr Armstrong.