As well as the website, morning note and podcast, Livewire has a YouTube channel. This has taken on a life of its own, with subscribers more than quadrupling to 25,000 in the year gone by.
While we are usually happy with a video getting 5,000 views, we had a few videos that went into another orbit completely. So for this wire, I wanted to shine the light on the five most 'viral' of them all in 2019.
Between them, these five most viral videos amassed over one million views. If you were to watch them yourself that many times consecutively (well, they are pretty good!), it would take you 12,057 days, or 33 years!
With each of these videos proving hugely popular, I've rounded them up for you to provide a glimpse into what caught our audience and the investing community's attention last year. I hope you enjoy!
Donald Amstad, Aberdeen Standard Investments, speaking to Livewire Exclusive
This video is in a league of its own. I remember doing a double-take when I first saw the view count quickly sail past 5,000 which we would usually have consider a great result, on its way to 50,000, then 1000,000, and then past 500,000.
If you missed it, Don delivers an unscripted, chilling monologue on the systemic risks building up in the markets, and what it means for investors. For example:
“...if they do come out with another bout of QE then banks are going to go bust, pension funds are going to go bust, insurance companies are going to go bust. And if it pushes the stock market back up again, then the 99.9% are probably not going to tolerate more handouts. That leads to social and political instability. I am very worried about the West. I think it is verging on catastrophe and what is interesting of course is the markets are just beginning to wake up to this."
It currently has 724,000 views, which represents a cumulative viewing time of 9,610 days, or 26.4 years...
Trump has badly misread China's hand
From the same shoot, Don also expressed his views on the US-China trade war and how the market may be thinking about it wrong. With 153,000 views on this one, the cumulative viewing time is around 367 days.
“In China there is no political cycle. President Trump has got 15 months to sort this out before he faces re-election. So, time is very much on China’s side.”
Between these two videos, Don has had 877,000 views, or 27.3 years-worth of viewing time. Pretty remarkable, particularly given that (as he admitted in his latest shoot) his previous record on YouTube had been 500 views!
Our annual event, Livewire Live, was a huge success and generated a number of popular videos. In this one, we asked seven presenting fund managers to deliver a shocking prediction for 2020 and beyond.
The exercise was designed to stimulate debate and to get investors thinking about where the consensus view could be challenged. Our speakers delivered opinions on topics ranging from geopolitics and interest rate settings through warnings on liquidity, contrarian stock calls and a searing short thesis.
This video had just over 100,000 views, generating 1,689 days-worth (or 4.6 years) of viewing time.
After Dr Philipp Hofflin from Lazard Asset Management wrote an extensive, and very popular, piece of research on the long-term drivers of the residential housing market he kindly backed it up with a discussion published in this wire, which also contains his excellent CIO profile interview. In all the video had 141 days-worth of viewing time.
In this special video, the Chief Investment Officers of two of the largest funds in the country, Platinum Asset Management and Magellan Financial Group sat down together for a remarkable discussion with Livewire's James Marlay, which has had 237 days worth of viewing time, and rising.
If you enjoyed that, Andrew and Hamish appeared together at Livewire Live.
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