Disruption – The Weed Market in Oregon

Oregon allows recreational marijuana. Originally, there were laws limiting growers to local Oregon companies (when it was a medical marijuana industry) which were effectively eliminated when the transition was made to recreational usage (allowing out of state funding). There was also a relatively small local market for growing cannabis.

Dispensaries cropped up everywhere, even in seemingly small, out of the way tourist towns with only a few hundred souls. It seems that you can’t go far without seeing the “green cross” that symbolizes a marijuana dispensary. Unlike other states, Oregon apparently allowed anyone who met basic criteria to open a “weed store”.

While it surprised many of the locals who curated their wares and made custom strains of local cannabis, the free market reared its head and drove down prices on effectively undifferentiated product and storefronts. From the local WWeek newspaper:

A gram of weed was selling for less than the price of a glass of wine… we have standard grams on the shelf at $4… before we didn’t see a gram below $8… Wholesale sun-grown weed fell from $1500 a pound last summer to as low as $700 by mid-October.

As a result of this, there is significant consolidation in the market as smaller growers either bow out or are bought up and dispensaries are being purchased by large groups (often vertically integrated with growers) at fire-sale prices.

(the) Oregon cannabis industry is a bleak scene: small businesses laying off employees and shrinking operations. Farms shuttering.

One farm profiled in the article went into growing weed with the expectation of selling at $1500 a pound; when they finally had to liquidate most of their crop at a weed auction, they only received $100 a pound.

The entire Oregon recreational cannabis industry has played out exactly as you would expect in a market with few barriers to entry and a relatively undifferentiated commodity:

1. Suppliers rush in to take advantage of high prices for crops, turning what was originally a weed shortage (and resulting scarce supply) into a huge spike in supply which in turn drove down wholesale prices to almost nothing on the margin

2. Retailers who have little or no differentiation are being driven out of business by low profits or being forced to run at a loss

For me the interesting part of this is not the plain execution of basic market economics (in an industry with low barriers to entry, prices will drive down to near marginal cost of the most efficient operator), but in what that means to “adjacent” industries. For example, if a gram of (high quality) weed is the price of a single glass of wine (actually a lot less at $4… that is probably 1/3 of the price of a glass of decent wine at a standard restaurant), will customers switch from beer or wine to cannabis? From an economic perspective (cost / buzz) this would be a relatively clear-cut choice. Over time economists should chart the impact of low cannabis prices on both prices and consumption in adjacent alcohol industries.

Cross posted at LITGM

Tax Reform Impact – Capital Gains and Investment Income

Recently I was at Powell’s bookstore In Oregon when I came across this book which attempts to be an introduction to the complexities of taxation. I thought that this was in the spirit of what I was going to try to do as I start to review the 2017 Tax Reform act and its’ myriad impacts on the economy and individual incentives.







As an individual investor, I started with looking at capital gains and investment income. Some thoughts:


1. The same general split applies; long term gains are taxed at favorable (lower) rates, and short term gains are taxed as ordinary income. The ordinary income tax brackets are always higher than the capital gains brackets

2. The tax rates for capital gains are 0, 15% and 20%. These are the same as under the previous tax laws.
Here is a brief article from the Motley Fool

3. The rates on ordinary income have gone down a bit, so the average person would pay less on gains, all else being equal (but this gets into your state and the standard deduction, a different topic). Thus there is no significant impact on investments here, it should be slightly favorable

4. Although there was talk of changing the way stock sales are accounted for to limit “tax loss harvesting”, these changes did not occur. I believe that you can still deduct up to $3000 in losses against ordinary income, but I haven’t been able to find that yet to confirm either

5. The 3.8% surtax on gains if your income is above $250,000 remains the same; this does not seem to be impacted by the law

6. While there were changes throughout the code that impacted REITS (real estate limited trusts) and MLP’s (Master Limited Partnerships), these changes didn’t fundamentally impact their value to classes of high income investors (they still have favorable tax characteristics)

7. There was some discussion of eliminating the Federal tax free nature of municipal bonds, but that deduction remained intact

8. There also was some discussion of changing the 401(k) deductions; this too, remained intact


Thus for investors, the basics of investing for individual investors (not the super wealthy) and the impact of taxation did not see significant changes under the new tax law. The types of tactics you would use under the prior tax law mostly moved into the new environment intact.




Cross Posted at LITGM

Disruption – MoviePass

MoviePass is a service that has gained a lot of new users lately – it allows you to see unlimited movies (only one a day) each month for $9.95, which is essentially the price of a single ticket. How it works is that they give you a Mastercard that is connected to your mobile phone – when you get to the theater, you connect with them at that time and they authorize the card specifically for the amount needed to pay for the movie and then you pay and go inside. The process is set up so that theaters can’t deny MoviePass at the box office because it is basically just another Mastercard and the only way to disable it would be to disable accept MasterCard, which is impractical or likely impossible for a host of reasons. The movie theaters receive the full price of the ticket through MoviePass, even if it is more than the $9.95 subscription fee (movies can cost almost $20 in Manhattan, for instance). In the short term, this is a “boon” for movie theaters because Wall Street investors are subsidizing their full price tickets.

Here is a NYT article on the growth of MoviePass. Per the article, they are adding 1 million subscribers a month. The ostensible play (what they say) is that they plan to “break even” on the cost of the service (if you see roughly one movie / month) but then they will make their money on using data from customers in an aggregated fashion to sell to the movie studios for marketing and targeting. They believe that this data and targeting consumers can add 5-7% to the box office gross. Note that the guy who helped found MoviePass was an executive at Netflix and RedBox named Mitch Lowe and he is very sophisticated financially and connected so he is a serious rival to the movie industry in general.

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Disruption – Amazon Basics and Amazon Essentials

“Amazon Basics” is a line of low cost products created especially by Amazon. “Amazon Essentials” is an apparel line created by Amazon. This picture has a “basics” speaker and a low cost “essentials” product (the notebook):

– a portable wireless bluetooth speaker for $19.99

Essentials dot matrix notebook for bullet journal for $9.92

I was impressed by both of these items. When you go to Amazon and either the basics or essentials section there is a wide array of products to choose from at amazingly low prices.

Amazon is choosing which markets and products that they want to compete in directly and they offer what appears to be reasonable quality products at low price points. If you cycle through the product list you can see a lot of everyday products or items that don’t normally have a strong branding component.

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Disruption – Delivery

Traditionally the big companies that handle “last mile” package delivery are Fed Ex (ticker: FDX), UPS (ticker: UPS), and of course the US postal service. These companies have hundreds of thousands of employees (often unionized) and billions of dollars of planes and trucks and other transportation assets.

Amazon (ticker: AMZN) recently began expanding their transportation capabilities, both in the form of their own airplanes and leveraging an “Uber-like” workforce of contractors leveraging an app to deliver packages in their own cars with a program called “Amazon Flex“.

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