I’m utterly in awe of what Daniel Ek is doing at Spotify with their podcast investments. The stock is up 63% over the past year, but 100% over the last month, as they sign one massive podcast deal after another. In just the last few days they’ve announced an exclusive deal with Warner Brothers to […]
Our new weekly email blast for financial advisors only
We’re very fortunate to have the best curator of content in all of finance as our firm’s director of investor education. Tadas Viskanta, creator and author of the incomparable Abnormal Returns blog, began doing a weekly email blast for our own client-facing advisors a few weeks back. I took a look at it and said […]
20.5 million continuing unemployment claims
WSJ: New applications for benefits edged lower by 58,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.5 million in the week ended June 13, the Labor Department said Thursday. While it is the fewest weekly applications since mid-March, it also showed the pace of layoffs is no longer significantly easing. The number of Americans receiving benefits payments fell by 62,000 […]
Driving, not flying
Chart o’ the Day comes from Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s economics team. They track mobility surveys from the Dallas Fed and Google to determine the speed and strength of the economy’s reopening. There’s an interesting thing happen between the rate at which flying returns versus driving. It’s intuitive that people taking trips this summer […]
Who is the house?
It’s a tortured metaphor, but one you’re hearing a lot lately: The stock market is a casino. Hell, even I’ve said it over the last few weeks. Outside of the 1930’s and 2008, 2020 features the highest percentage of days (32%) with 2% swings for the S&P 500 up or down. And there are millions […]
Feelings drive short-term prices
I had an interesting conversation with a friend this morning about the stocks he holds, and the roller coaster ride they’ve been on over the last few weeks. I got as much out of the conversation as he did, because it was a helpful reminder about how much stocks move based on feelings versus the […]
Frank Partnoy on the hidden systemic risk of leveraged loans
Frank Partnoy is a UC Berkely law professor and an expert on securities law. He wrote one of my favorite stock market books ever, The Match King, about one of the biggest corporate frauds of all time, which I wrote about here. Partnoy has a new article in The Atlantic this week looking at a […]
Unheard of
I’m not sure but I think Hertz may be the first listed company in history to announce a secondary stock offering after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This headline is truly one for the ages: When I saw it, I rubbed my eyes – I almost couldn’t believe this was real. But it is. This […]
Listen to Jeremy Grantham explain the slow death of value investing better than anyone
Patrick O’Shaughnessy had GMO’s Jeremy Grantham on the other day and the first topic they got into was why value investing has stopped working, at least in the traditional sense. Grantham’s amazing in this interview. It’s loaded with lots of other stuff he’s thinking about, including the FANG stock phenomenon, what’s going on with commodity […]
Two big L’s in a row
Those who refuse to acknowledge the racial injustice awakening going on in our country this summer took two big L’s within the last week or so. They lost the NFL – the league now admits it was wrong not to support the right of players to express their feelings about police brutality in black communities. […]