Money Stuff FML candidates (2026-08-15 to 2026-09-14)

Candidate sections: 92
Issues scanned: 12

First Principles / Financial Frauds & Ponzi Dynamics (1)

2026-08-06 - I think sometimes about the Warren Buffett adage (Money Stuff: Fake SpaceX Stock Isn’t Worth as Much): that “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” I often find that it’s the reverse. If you are running a fraudulent business, and a big financial crisis bankrupts a lot of legitimate businesses, you can tell your investors “hey guys sorry but we just got bankrupted…

First Principles / Incentives & Agency Problems (1)

2026-09-10 - I have written a couple of times (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities): about the problem of compensation in lucrative industries, which is that you need to pay people enough that they don’t quit to work for your rivals, but not so much that they quit to sit on the beach. In most normal jobs, the minimum competitive pay is well below the maximum call-in-rich…

First Principles / Tax (4)

2026-08-04 - We have talked a few (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF): times about tax-aware long-short strategies. If you buy a bunch of stocks, some will go up and some will go down. You sell the ones that went down, generating capital losses that you can use to offset other capital gains, and keep the ones that went up, deferring capital gains taxes. This…
2026-08-06 - The Harvard Undergraduate Consulting Group wastasked with looking for (Money Stuff: Fake SpaceX Stock Isn’t Worth as Much): vulnerabilities to certain risks among AstraZeneca’s suppliers and suggesting how the company could use data to anticipate problems, according to internal HUCG documents obtained by Bloomberg. It was just one of more than 30 assignments that the group took on last year, including tasks for Delta Air Lines Inc. and Samsung Electronics…
2026-09-02 - Dividend shuffle (Money Stuff: The ETF Dividend Flip): Let’s say you own stock in a company that has announced that it will pay a $2 per share dividend to anyone who holds the stock on Wednesday. On Tuesday, the stock closes at $100 per share. If you buy the stock on Tuesday, you receive it on Wednesday — this is…
2026-09-02 - Billionaire strategy (Money Stuff: The ETF Dividend Flip): Back in the glory days of financial blogs, there was one called Long or Short Capital . In 2006, it published a post under the byline Johnny Debacle, with the title “Four Simple Steps to Becoming a Billionaire .” I still think about it from time to time. Here are the steps,…

How Entities Work / Commercial Banks (4)

2026-08-04 - Last weekend Bloomberg’s Yiqin Shen published a fun story (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF): that would make for a good final exam in a financial engineering class. It has a bit of everything. Start with leveraged exchange-traded funds. Lots of investors want to get 2 or 3 times the daily return of some stock, and there are single-stock levered ETFs that provide this. Investors put in…
2026-08-27 - Here’s “Why do borrowers make mortgage refinancing mistakes (Money Stuff: AI Refi): ,” by Sumit Agarwal, Richard Rosen and Vincent Yao (2013), which gives a flavor of the problem 6<>: The decision to refinance a mortgage optimally requires solving a complicated system of partial differential equations. This can prove to be problematic because significant cognitive ability often is needed to properly make optimal financial…
2026-09-10 - Hudson River Trading isone of Wall Street’s most lucrative high-speed (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities): traders and market-makers. For Carroll, the sole founder still there, it has generated a personal fortune surpassing $27 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which is valuing his wealth for the first time. HRT’s more than 1,200 employees are reeling in twice as much profit as bigger and better-known rival Citadel…
2026-09-10 - We talk sometimes about (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities): how billionaires are created. Carroll was not on Bloomberg’s, or as far as I can tell anyone else’s, list of billionaires last week; today he is the 90th-richest person in the world. The main way to become a billionaire is: * You have some business that generates at least nine digits of…

How Entities Work / Investment Banks (1)

2026-08-06 - Here’s a Wall Street Journal story about Late Stage Management (Money Stuff: Fake SpaceX Stock Isn’t Worth as Much): , which sold shares in a SpaceX SPV to individual investors: Investor RamRupireddy wired over money before the end of the year, including $17,250 to take part in a fund that held shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. At the time, he estimated the…

How Entities Work / Private Equity & LBOs (4)

2026-08-10 - The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that (Money Stuff: The Situation Is Fine): a handful of celebrities are currently dating men who work in private equity. A runningbit around here is that “private equity” is a prestige laundering mechanism that sorts ambitious highly trained graduates of prestigious universities into jobs running pest control companies in the Midwest. This bit is not exactlytrue— private equity is…
2026-08-27 - Evergreen funds (Money Stuff: AI Refi): Historically, private equity was a lumpy business. You and a couple of your buddies started a private equity firm, you went around looking for companies to buy, and occasionally you bought one. When you did, you’d need to write a big check. You spruced the company up for a while, and then…
2026-09-08 - Apollo premium (Money Stuff: Robinhood Tokenized AMC): See okay my question is: Is Apollo overpaying for some liability management optionality, orunderpaying, or paying just the right amount? The Financial Times reports : Companies owned by Apollo Global Management funds pay about one percentage point more than typical private equity firms to borrow in corporate loan markets, according to a…
2026-09-08 - Here is the paper : “We find that, under three (Money Stuff: Robinhood Tokenized AMC): measures of reputation, portfolio companies owned by the most aggressive sponsors pay considerably higher yields than those owned by more genial sponsors.” Pages 21 and 23 have the League Table of Sponsor Aggressiveness, with Apollo at the top and Madison Dearborn apparently the most genial. 9<> The three measures of reputation are…

How Entities Work / Venture Capital & Startups (1)

2026-09-10 - Hudson River (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities): There is some hipsterism in the financial industry, and the pinnacle of a certain sort of financial prestige is to work at a very selective, very lucrative firm that almost nobody has ever heard of. Ifnobody has heard of it you can’t brag about it to anyone; you want a firm with…

How Markets Work / Commodity Markets (5)

2026-08-04 - Commodity market manipulation (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF): Earlier this year, Kalshi had some betting markets about who would attend the State of the Union address. One market was on George Santos, the former congressman, who naturally (1) traded the contract and (2) posted on X to manipulate its price: Santos made a series of social media posts regarding his…
2026-08-05 - Sports gambling: New York (Money Stuff: SpaceX Unlocks Tomorrow): One of the main goals of most gambling regulators is to minimize or at least manage the negative social consequences of gambling addiction. Regulated sportsbooks in the US tend to list problem-gambling hotlines on their websites, and sportsbooks that too aggressively exploit gambling addicts sometimes get in trouble. Most US states limit…
2026-08-12 - Gambling emergency (Money Stuff: AI-Backed Securities): The basic situation is that US states have historically regulated sports gambling, either banning it or allowing it in regulated forms. But recently prediction markets like Kalshi Inc. have started offering sports gambling and claiming that, as federally regulated commodities exchanges, they are exempt from state regulation. In the past, the federal…
2026-08-12 - The Commodity Exchange Actrequires the Commission to provide a uniform (Money Stuff: AI-Backed Securities): national market in derivatives transactions. As part of this obligation, the CFTC ensures public confidence in its markets by safeguarding market resilience and orderliness. The Commission is also tasked with providing competitive, fair, and efficient markets that protect the price discovery process of trading in the centralized derivatives markets. Major market disruptions…
2026-08-27 - Underpriced options (Money Stuff: AI Refi): A central fact of consumer finance is that big sophisticated financial companies can offer ordinary consumers irrationally good deals, because the consumers will probably mess them up for normal human reasons. The best-known example might be credit card rewards. Patrick McKenziehas a classic explanation , but the schematic story is something like:…

How Markets Work / Derivatives (16)

2026-08-03 - Situational Awareness: hedging (Money Stuff: Hedgehog Hedge Fund): One thing you could do, as an investor, is try to figure out which stocks will go up, and buy them. You have $100, you find 10 really good stocks, you put $10 into each of them, and if they go up you make money. One problem with this approach is that…
2026-08-03 - At the New York Times, Rob Copeland suggests an (Money Stuff: Hedgehog Hedge Fund): East Coast/West Coast split in enthusiasm for Aschenbrenner’s approach 5<>: When this star of San Francisco arrived in New York during his fund-raising tour around last summer, however, he received a relatively cool reception, according to three people from whom he tried to raise money, who declined to be identified talking about…
2026-08-04 - We talked about crash insurance last week , and I (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF): mentioned some problems with it: * People do not like selling way-out-of-the-money insurance against unlikely events, because they collect only a small premium for the insurance, but might have to pay out a lot of money in bad states of the world. * You might not want to buy way-out-of-the-money insurance against…
2026-08-04 - And here we are! We talked last month about Section (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF): 351 exchange-traded funds. The gist of it is: * ETFs are, approximately, investing vehicles that pay no taxes on their gains; and * In a perfectly efficient financial world, every investor can become their own ETF, so that they never need to pay taxes on their gains. And today Bloomberg’s Loukia Gyftopoulou,…
2026-08-04 - Every headline about (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF): this says “insider trading ,” but I don’t think this is insider trading? Santos had no obligation of confidentiality to anyone to keep his State of the Union plans confidential; therefore he was free to trade on them. … I do think that announcing that you’re going to the State of the…
2026-08-05 - SpaceX unlock (Money Stuff: SpaceX Unlocks Tomorrow): Today, there are about 639 million shares of SpaceX available in the market, which SpaceX sold in its initial public offering in June. Tomorrow, there will be about 1.55 billion shares available, as a portion of the shares that were locked up after the IPO are unlocked. That’s much more. SpaceX should…
2026-08-10 - One of the core themes of this column (Money Stuff: The Situation Is Fine): is that it is good for your financial career tolose a billion dollars . This is largely a theory about hedge fund managers and bank traders; in those jobs, losing a billion dollars demonstrates that (1) someone trusted you with a billion dollars, (2) you boldly took risks with the money and…
2026-08-10 - Intraday momentum (Money Stuff: The Situation Is Fine): There are two basic investing strategies, value and momentum. Value means you try to buy low and sell high: You buy stocks that have gone down because now they’ll probably go up. Momentum means you try to buy high and sell higher: You buy stocks that have gone up because they’ll probably…
2026-08-12 - Donald Trump is selling early access to US policy (Money Stuff: AI-Backed Securities): decisions to hedge funds and trading firms for about $100,000 per month. (Technically his company, Trump Media & Technology Group Inc., is selling a feed of early access to policy announcements he makes on TMTG’s Truth Social site, but Trump is TMTG’s biggest shareholder.) Thepitch for this service is that Trump’s policy…
2026-08-13 - We have talked a number (Money Stuff: Bilateral OTC Goat Hedge): of times around here about businesses hedging real-world risk on prediction markets. Some business faces some risk from some real-world event: “If Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor, my business of selling Manhattan pied-à-terres will dry up,” or “if Cardi B doesn’tperform at the Super Bowl , I will sell less Cardi B-themed…
2026-08-13 - Northern California rancher Tim Arrowsmith owns a company called Western (Money Stuff: Bilateral OTC Goat Hedge): Grazers. The business provides targeted grazing to reduce wildfire risk by clearing dry brush in hard-to-reach areas. Arrowsmith has over 4,000 grazing goats and employs eight herders who work around the clock to manage the goats. A recent legislative interpretation eliminated California’s longstanding wage framework for goat herders, which had been designed…
2026-08-13 - I have, a couple of times (Money Stuff: Bilateral OTC Goat Hedge): , espoused a tidy theory that hedge funds can smooth out lockup expiries for big initial public offerings. The theory is: * When a company is added to an index, there is quite predictable demand for the stock, on a fixed date, from index funds. There is a big business , done…
2026-08-25 - TWG (Money Stuff: LeBron Bonds): Who should be making this loan ? When LeBron James signed up to lead the Los Angeles Lakers to NBA glory with a $154 million contract in 2018, it wasn’t the biggest deal he did that year. Just months before he joined, a limited liability company he controls borrowed almost $300 million…
2026-08-27 - We have talked about this a couple of times (Money Stuff: AI Refi): because, for a while, financial investors like Apollo Global Management were able to buy up a lot of these policies from insurance customers. The financial investors, unlike the ordinary customers,did optimally exercise; they kept paying the premiums whenever doing so had positive expected value. This was bad for the insurers. It wasn’t…
2026-09-02 - We talked on Monday about hedging KPIs . My basic (Money Stuff: The ETF Dividend Flip): points were: * Companies (and college football teams) want their executives (and coaches) to do good stuff like increase revenues and profit margins (and win football games). * Companies (and college football teams) therefore offer executives (and coaches) contingent compensation packages that pay them big bonuses if they hit certain key performance…
2026-09-10 - One of my favorite tropes of financial journalism (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities): is when some wealthy financial industry figure is described as being very down-to-earth and humble and not like all theother finance guys, but the proof of that is somethinglike “his most obvious indulgence is a Maserati Ghibli”or “he lives in a house that only cost a few million dollars.” My all-timefavorite example…

How Markets Work / Securities Regulation & Enforcement (1)

2026-08-13 - Here are the comments that have been submitted on (Money Stuff: Bilateral OTC Goat Hedge): that proposal. One isfrom me . It used to contain the text of that column, though now it reads “Copyrighted material redacted” with a link to my column. I did not actually submit it, and I am not entirely sure how it ended up on the SEC’s website. I can’t really complain:…

Running Storylines / AI & Technology in Finance (31)

2026-08-03 - And then Anthropic sort of supplanted OpenAI as the leading (Money Stuff: Hedgehog Hedge Fund): AI lab by (1) being even better at building AI models and (2) even more vocally worrying that its AI models might destroy humanity. Frontier AI research is a weird corner of the art world where you can command the highest prices by being the most anti-commercial. The most valuable frontier AI…
2026-08-03 - Anthropic said in a blog post Thursday that it made (Money Stuff: Hedgehog Hedge Fund): the discovery after performing a review of its own cybersecurity tests, following OpenAI’s announcement of a breach. In both the OpenAI and Anthropic tests, the AI models were able to access the internet from within testing environments that should have been sealed off, according to Anthropic’s blog. Part of me thinks that…
2026-08-03 - The Million-Dollar Talent Wars for 20-Something (Money Stuff: Hedgehog Hedge Fund): Math Geniuses. AstraZeneca Shares Fall on Deal Talks With Bristol-Myers. David Ellison’sRisky Courtroom Strategy to Save His $81 Billion Warner Deal. Tesla Weighs Sale of China Business to Pave Way forPotential SpaceX Merger . Jefferies Analyst Calls Out ‘Simple-Minded’ Criticism of SpaceX’s Governance . Wall Street learns tolove blockchain . Vitol, Cargill…
2026-08-04 - Taxes (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF): It seems plausible that finance would be getting more efficient over time. A lot of smart people work long hours to apply increasingly sophisticated math and technology to the allocation of capital; surely they should get better at it. What would that mean for investors? The simplest answer seems drab and boring:…
2026-08-04 - FBI crypto theft (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF): There are so many very poor decisions that one could make related to cryptocurrency wallets, but I suppose one of them is … stealing $1 million of crypto from North Korean hackers (?) while working for the FBI? Orwhatever this is : An FBI agent has allegedly turned himself in for stealing…
2026-08-04 - Inside Google’s $200bn Wall Street finance machine (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF): for Anthropic. AI Power Demands Spur Builders to Seek Billions inBank Pledges . Anthropic Inks $10 Billion Computing Deal With New Cloud Startup. China’s AI Blitz Creates ‘ Death Zone ’ for Rival US Model Makers. The AI Boom Is Transforming the American Economy Beyond Recognition. Millennium Lost 2% Last Month as…
2026-08-05 - Situational Awareness (Money Stuff: SpaceX Unlocks Tomorrow): How much money was Situational Awareness, Leopold Aschenbrenner’s artificial intelligence-focused hedge fund, running at its peak? I don’t know! There are reports suggesting that it had perhaps$45 billion of assets under managementat its peak in early July . And there are reports suggesting that at least some of its book was levered…
2026-08-05 - Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s Hema Parmar and Nishant Kumar report that (Money Stuff: SpaceX Unlocks Tomorrow): “Whale Rock Capital Management’s flagship hedge fund is one of the biggest losers in last month’s AI selloff, with a 21.7% drop in July erasing about half of its gains for the year.” But they alsoalso report that ; Citadel’s flagship fund surged 5.9% in July as the firm became one of…
2026-08-05 - Wall Street Investment Bankers’ Bonuses to Climb as (Money Stuff: SpaceX Unlocks Tomorrow): Deals Surge. Trump administration refunds $100bn in‘liberation day’ tariffs . US Keeps Debt-Sale Guidance Steady, Deepening Bill Reliance . Blackstone Has Pitched Mega Debt Package forAnthropic Chip Deal . Banks to offload $15bn of debt forAnthropic data centre backed by Google. SpaceX’sAI Splurge Puts a Damper on First Earnings After IPO. China…
2026-08-06 - OpenAI margin loan (Money Stuff: Fake SpaceX Stock Isn’t Worth as Much): The big picture is something like: * OpenAI and Anthropic are fairly young, fast-growing, somewhat experimental, mostly unprofitable tech startups. As is customary in that situation, they finance themselves with equity: They raise money from venture capitalists hoping for huge upside if they succeed, not from bond investors who want certainty of…
2026-08-06 - My basic take on Leopold Aschenbrenner and (Money Stuff: Fake SpaceX Stock Isn’t Worth as Much): Situational Awareness has been that: * Being smart and plugged-in about the long-term rise of artificial intelligence is a pretty good investing strategy, but * Doing it in a hedge fund with lots of borrowed money that can be called away at any time is a bad funding strategy. “If you’re a…
2026-08-06 - Millennium Partners With Anthropic to Develop AI Risk Analyst (Money Stuff: Fake SpaceX Stock Isn’t Worth as Much): . Biggest US law firms explore selling stakes to private equity. Alphabet Is Seeking Up to $25 Billion From Latest Bond Sale . Blackstone BDC Profit Drops 94% While Loan Performance Steadies. InsideIntel : how America’s chip champion came back from the brink. Armed With $10 Billion, Sequoia’s Leaders Plan Its New…
2026-08-10 - Over time, I have extended the theory (Money Stuff: The Situation Is Fine): to tech startups , where losing a billion dollars demonstrates different but related good qualities. “Move fast and break things,” “fail quickly,” etc.: If you have lost a billion dollars then you definitely know how to fail quickly. Also, if there is one thing that Silicon Valley prizes above all else, it…
2026-08-10 - Private Equity Is Stuck With 33,575 Unsold Businesses (Money Stuff: The Situation Is Fine): . China Unleashes $28 Trillion Capital Markets to Challenge US in AI. Intel to Sell $15 Billion in Stock With AI Boom Lifting Demand. Anthropic, Macquarie and GIC Form Venture for AI Data Centers . The bank behind China’s AI listings bonanza. Investors Want Quarterly Reports , Unfavorable Results and All. Jane…
2026-08-12 - The basic business of finance is slicing up cash flows (Money Stuff: AI-Backed Securities): . You have some stuff, the stuff generates cash flows, you put the stuff in a box, the box issues securities to investors, the securities have claims on the cash flows. Some investors want safe securities with senior claims on the cash flows: If the stuff is expected to generate $100 of…
2026-08-12 - Here is the SEC’s interpretive letter , and here is (Money Stuff: AI-Backed Securities): theletter from Latham & Watkins LLP requesting it: We respectfully request that the Staff concur with our view that fixed-income or other securities issued in data center securitizations of the type described in this letter (“Data Center Securitizations” or “DCS”) are not Exchange Act ABS because the securitized assets are not “self-liquidating…
2026-08-12 - Although a portion of the Securitized Assets include customer contracts (Money Stuff: AI-Backed Securities): (including in some cases leases) that generate revenue necessary for the Issuer to make payments due on the securities, the revenue generated is reduced by expenses to operate and maintain the data center facility (e.g., taxes, insurance, electricity, repairs and maintenance, security services, etc.). Consequently, the payments to the holders of the…
2026-08-12 - Musical earnings calls (Money Stuff: AI-Backed Securities): Two theories about the financial industry are: * The financial industry creates a massive waste of talent: So many of the best and brightest scientists end up working at high-frequency trading firms, making a bit of extra money for those firms in a largely zero-sum competition instead of curing cancer or discovering…
2026-08-12 - Nvidia’s Show of Financial Force Soothes Credit Markets (Money Stuff: AI-Backed Securities): . Why Wall Street and Nvidia Are Building an Exotic Money Pipeline for the AI Boom. AI Looms Over Software Companies — and the Investors Who Piled Into Them. Goldman Sachs to Acquire ETF Provider Neos in $2.3 Billion Deal. Most Power Sought for US Data Centers Will Never Materialize. Citadel Securities…
2026-08-25 - Situational Awareness (Money Stuff: LeBron Bonds): The Archegos situation was, roughly: * Archegos Capital Management, Bill Hwang’s family office, borrowed a lot of money from several banks to buy about a dozen stocks. * Archegos bought a lot of those stocks, often becoming the biggest holder of those stocks and buying large chunks of the daily volume. *…
2026-08-25 - AI margin loans (Money Stuff: LeBron Bonds): If you went to a bank and asked for a loan against your shares of a ball bearings company, the bank would probably think about the value of your ball-bearings shares, and their volatility, and how long it would take to liquidate them. If you owned half a day’s volume of a…
2026-08-25 - Also, though, I wrote a few weeks ago about a (Money Stuff: LeBron Bonds): margin loan to SoftBank secured by its stake in OpenAI: “Borrowing against OpenAI to buy more OpenAI” is a decent description of the global economy right now. If OpenAI’s valuation collapses, then the banks that gave SoftBank this margin loan will be in bad trouble, butso will all the other banks. Might…
2026-08-25 - Broadcom Credit Risk Soars on Mega AI Debt Financing Backstops (Money Stuff: LeBron Bonds): . Mexico Bonds Trade Like Junk After $130 Billion Bailout of Pemex . SoftBank Plans Record Retail Bond Issuance Amid AI Push. Thoma Bravo Conceded 40 Deal Sweeteners as Debt Talks Heat Up. Private Equity Finds New Way to Ride OutCash Crunch . Private equity growth funds attract record first-half inflows as…
2026-08-27 - Anyway Bloomberg’s Jack Trapanick and Scott Carpenter report (Money Stuff: AI Refi): : Lenders say artificial intelligence will help homeowners whose mortgages are ripe for refinancing secure a new, cheaper loan far faster. The result could also squeeze investors in the $9 trillion market for mortgage bonds. When interest rates fall, only about a third of homeowners who could save substantial sums by refinancing…
2026-08-27 - Faster turnaround could double the percentage of eligible homeowners who (Money Stuff: AI Refi): refinance to perhaps 60%, according to a report from Morgan Stanley strategists including Jay Bacow, co-head of securitized products research. If that happens, they wrote, AI could make the 30-year mortgage seem like something “closer to a floating-rate instrument that only floats down.” The Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that, if this happened,…
2026-08-27 - Jane Street’s growing pains. Private Credit (Money Stuff: AI Refi): Investors Prefer to Be Trapped Than Take 26% Loss. Todd Boehly’s Insurer Vows to Slash Pile of Collateral Loans. Nvidia Sees AI-Fueled Demand Boosting Sales 70% Next Year. Nvidia Agrees to Buy Open Source AI Platform Hugging Face For $12.9 Billion. Bitcoin treasury companies shed $80bn in value as business model unwinds….
2026-09-02 - Law firm AI (Money Stuff: The ETF Dividend Flip): The economic model of law firms is something like this: * Clients want to hire certain lawyers — partners at big law firms — for their judgment, skill and experience. * The top partners at top law firms can make $20 million a year or more. * If you want to hire…
2026-09-02 - Chevron to Invest $7 Billion Doubling Its Venezuelan Output (Money Stuff: The ETF Dividend Flip): . Volkswagen Fights Chinese Competition — and Its Own Board — in Battle to Survive. S&P Weighs Multibillion-Dollar Spinout of Data PlatformCapital IQ . Nvidia Nears $14 Billion Hugging Face Deal This Week. The Rapid Expansion That Built Bally’s Is Now Under Pressure. Uber to Cut 10% of Jobs, or 3,300 Roles,…
2026-09-10 - The financial industry has developed sophisticated tools to address this (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities): problem, tools like “your office rival has a house closer to the beach in Amagansett so you have to keep working to outdo her.” The main financial centers offer an enormous array of arbitrarily priced positional goods, and the apprenticeship model of finance teaches people to value them, so by the time…
2026-09-10 - Anyway here’s a Wall Street Journal article about (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities): this problem, or I guess the other side of it, which is all the AI researchers getting paid life-changing money and having no idea what to do with it: “They are not flashy,” says Garret Spiecker, a senior managing director at Citizens Private Bank who runs the pre-IPO, late-stage, private stock-lending program…
2026-09-10 - A reader emailed me this tweet (from @GoatBots last (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities): week) and told me that it relates to alleged insider trading in “virtual Magic: The Gathering Online cards.” The tweet says: Someone involved with the Pauper Format Panel is profiting from inside information, buying more than 250 copies of Baleful Strix, Vandalblast and Dispatch from our bots yesterday before the Zeta Set…

Running Storylines / Crypto & Digital Assets (6)

2026-08-03 - Coldcard (Money Stuff: Hedgehog Hedge Fund): A Bitcoin is an entry on a distributed digital ledger. It lives on the internet. It could not live anywhere else. It is possible to be a little loose about this. We havetalked a lot about a guy who accidentally threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins, which are now buried…
2026-08-13 - It’s better if you can find an 83-year-old Army veteran (Money Stuff: Bilateral OTC Goat Hedge): to say “how disgusted I am that my financial investments are being used as a political pawn,” or aretired Marine veteran ” to say “I didn’t invest my money to have others make any kind of political statement. I invested my money to be able to leave something for my children and…
2026-09-08 - And then there is “tokenization ”: I sell you a (Money Stuff: Robinhood Tokenized AMC): “token,” on a crypto blockchain, representing AMC stock. What is that token? We are still in the early stages of tokenization, but conceptually it could be one of four things: * It could be, effectively, stock: AMC issues its own stock in tokenized form; its ledger is maintained on the blockchain, and…
2026-09-08 - And AMC hates it. Bloomberg’s Sidhartha Shukla reports (Money Stuff: Robinhood Tokenized AMC): : The craze for tokenizing shares on the blockchain has ignited a public spat between two men who were once hailed as heroes of the meme-stock era. AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Officer Adam Aron traded barbs with his counterpart at Robinhood Markets Inc. on Thursday and Friday after discovering a…
2026-09-08 - Hunter Biden laptop memecoin (Money Stuff: Robinhood Tokenized AMC): Sure sure sure, sure , sure: The son of former President Joe Biden is launching a meme coin that takes aim at his family’s nemesis, Donald Trump. And he’s naming it for the most-infamous personal computer in American political history. … Biden’s token will trade under the ticker, $LAPTOP, and launch Sept….
2026-09-10 - Tether private credit (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities): Look, the simple model is that Tether is a bank. Just a big lightly regulated bank with cheap funding. People give Tether dollars, and it gives them back stablecoins (USDT). The people can more or less withdraw their dollars on demand (just like bank deposits), and the stablecoins more or less don’t…

Running Storylines / Meme Stocks & Retail Investing (7)

2026-08-03 - The basic theory of retail stock and options (Money Stuff: Hedgehog Hedge Fund): trading is: * Retail traders buy and sell stocks, effectively, at random. * If you can charge them a bid/ask spread — buy stock from them for $50 and sell to them at $50.01, or buy options from them at $2 and sell to them at $2.10 — then you will, in…
2026-08-05 - Sports gambling: Robinhood (Money Stuff: SpaceX Unlocks Tomorrow): Here is a story that you could have told — and that I have told — about Robinhood Markets Inc.: * Robinhood is a brokerage platform that makes it fun, easy and commission-free to trade stocks or options from your phone. * This got a lot of young people hooked on frenetically…
2026-08-10 - GameStop/eBay (Money Stuff: The Situation Is Fine): The thing is, GameStop Corp. never really put in a $56 billion bid to buy eBay Inc . What happened is that GameStop’s feisty chief executive officer, Ryan Cohen, is fond of eBay and thinks he would do a good job running it, so he approached eBay and said “hey, wouldn’t it…
2026-08-10 - We talked on Thursday about prediction market tick (Money Stuff: The Situation Is Fine): sizes. My basic points were: * Prediction market event contracts typically have prices between $0 and $1, with an average price of $0.50. * They typically trade in increments of $0.01. * That’s a tick size of about 2% of value, which is really high. (Compare US stocks, which usually have prices…
2026-08-13 - Fake comments (Money Stuff: Bilateral OTC Goat Hedge): The way financial regulation works in the US is that a regulator proposes a new rule , and then the general public has the opportunity to submit comments. The comments might support the rule, or oppose it, or suggest changes. Then the regulatory agency has to consider the comments and come up…
2026-09-08 - Tokenization (Money Stuff: Robinhood Tokenized AMC): One theory is that nobody should be allowed to create a share of stock except the company whose stock it is. A company, say AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., issues892,604,638 shares of stock, registered on its own share ledger, maintained by a transfer agent. If you want to buy stock, you have to…
2026-09-08 - One of my little hipster theories around here is (Money Stuff: Robinhood Tokenized AMC): that the financial industry misses pension funds. In the olden days, US workers got their retirement income from big pension funds managed by professional managers. Those big funds could invest some of their money in pretty spicy stuff: They had a lot of money, so putting 1% of it in spicy stuff…

Running Storylines / Private Markets Are the New Public Markets (2)

2026-08-03 - Situational Awareness: margin (Money Stuff: Hedgehog Hedge Fund): One other thing. Bill Hwang’s family office, Archegos Capital Management, blew up in April 2021 by making concentrated levered bets on a few stocks. When that happened,I wrote : One thing about margin lending is that if you borrow money to buy stocks, and your stocks go up, you automatically deleverage. If…
2026-08-06 - SPVs (Money Stuff: Fake SpaceX Stock Isn’t Worth as Much): Today is the first lockup release date for SpaceX, which also means it’s the day that a lot of people will find out that they own fake SpaceX stock. SpaceX was a private company for a long time, and a lot of people — current and former employees, venture capitalists, Elon Musk…

Needs review (8)

2026-08-06 - Tick sizes (Money Stuff: Fake SpaceX Stock Isn’t Worth as Much): I just want to make a small dumb point about why prediction markets are hot right now. 2<> It is: * Modern prediction market event contracts on platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket and Robinhood have one-dollar notional prices: Every contract pays off $1 or $0, depending on whether the underlying event occurs….
2026-08-06 - Harvard consultants (Money Stuff: Fake SpaceX Stock Isn’t Worth as Much): Stereotypically, the way the consulting business works is that firms hire recent graduates of top universities who are good at doing mock case interviews, send them out to big corporations to make PowerPoint presentations about the corporations’ business problems, charge the corporations large fees, and use the fees to (1) pay the…
2026-08-13 - Here is the actual Kalshi goat herding contract . I (Money Stuff: Bilateral OTC Goat Hedge): want to make a few points about it. First, it was listed last week, purelyfor this trade. This is not a case where Kalshi had an active market in California goat herding legislation probabilities. This is a bilateral trade between the goat guy and Susquehanna, which was then listed on Kalshi. CNBC…
2026-08-25 - One useful model is that the postmodern version of (Money Stuff: LeBron Bonds): the “pension fund” is the “alternative asset manager investing the money of life-and-annuity insurance companies.” That is: A pension fund traditionally provides a steady predictable long-term stream of income to retirees, but the US has largely moved away from traditional defined-benefit pensions. But pension funds aregreat investors, with long time horizons and…
2026-08-27 - Elsewhere in underpriced options (Money Stuff: AI Refi): Arguably the way jobs work is: * You work at a job, they like you, they pay you. * The amount they pay you is, generically, enough to keep you. * Therefore, to get more money, the main thing you have to do is to credibly demonstrate that someone else will pay…
2026-09-02 - We have talked a few times (Money Stuff: The ETF Dividend Flip): about the fact that an ETF is approximately an investment vehicle that doesn’t pay taxes, and that this technology has been so broadly generalized that maybe one day no investors will have to pay taxes. But this isn’t that; this has nothing to do with that. This is just trading around ex…
2026-09-10 - TXSE (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities): There is arguably something a bit weird about stock exchanges as for-profit businesses. In the olden days, stock exchanges were often nonprofit members’ organizations: There’d be 20 stockbrokers in a city, and they would all meet up under a tree or on a sidewalk to trade stocks with each other, and then…
2026-09-10 - TXSE’s fact sheet says things like “TXSE is working (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities): in collaboration with Texas Gov. Abbott and the state legislature to create the most pro-business environment in the country and fuel the Texas economic juggernaut,” and mentions theTexas state law that allows companies listed on Texas exchanges (like TXSE) to limit annoying shareholder proposals. The main pitch is probably that, in the…