Aadil Mamujee

From time to time, I have an opinion on how the world may evolve and have not found a good way to invest in these kinds of macro theses. It’s too difficult or time consuming to find public (or private) products that provide access to these types of investment opportunities.

I would love to find a platform that surfaced more niche, long tail investment strategies or figure out how to enable folks to create packages of investment products for themselves around macro theses and then offer them externally. If this could be made much simpler, we could see a decentralization / democratization of ‘funds’ and fund managers and many more niche funds/investment products that would allow investors to create much more customized portfolios.

A selection of these macro theses are below, together with how I’ve tried to invest in them (and mostly failed).

• Technology entrepreneurship in Africa: I think that a number of significant companies will come out of Africa in the next few decades but the timing of when these companies will ‘hit’ is hard to predict and unclear. This is the only ‘thesis’ which I’m actually getting exposure to in a systematic way. I’m planning to invest consistently and conservatively in a wide range of sectors over the next 3-5 years and see how the market evolves through Musha Ventures.
• Esports: In 2014, after spending a few years playing games like Starcraft and League of Legends I became convinced that Esports would be as big or bigger than ‘traditional sports’. There are opportunities in Esports for professional players to create much deeper relationships with their fans because of the nature of the platform (e.g. livestreaming on Twitch). I wanted to invest in ‘Esports’ at a macro level but could not find a way to get exposure at this level. One idea I had was to buy a small percentage of every large Esports team (Cloud9, FNATIC, SKTelcom etc) and use this as proxy for the Esports market without taking any individual team risk. There was no comparable product that existed and it would have done quite well over the last 5 years and still think it would do well over the next 5-10 years.
• Up and coming cities: I’m short real estate in ‘mega-cities’ like NYC and London over the next 10-20 years. I think that the nature of work will change to be more distributed, and prestigious (high paying) jobs that drive up real estate prices in major cities will be more accessible from other cities in similar time zones like Nashville, Austin, Denver, Atlanta etc. I wish there was a way to invest in some sort of property index / REIT for these cities vs. buying a house or apartment in a major city where I currently live – surprisingly difficult to find.
• Mental health: We have neglected mental health for too long. We have improved our tools as a species of fixing physical ailments but are still behind on mental health. There are scenarios where we, as humans, may not die of normal age related disease and can maintain younger, healthier bodies for longer periods of time. Currently 1.5% of deaths per year are driven by suicide (from Homodeus) and this will likely get worse over time. How could I best invest this macro thesis as a value investor beyond individual public/private companies – meditation, psychology, hallucinogens etc?
• Meat Alternatives / Niche meat producers: I think that only very high quality meat producers of rare meat (e.g. Wagyu beef, Iberico Pork etc) will survive, albeit at a much higher price point, and the rest of normal meat consumption will be fulfilled through plant based and lab grown alternatives which will both be cheaper and better for our environment – again I can’t find an investment product for this in the public markets. I could invest in a single company like Beyond Meat but I’m looking for a basket of companies to support the thesis.