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

High-signal candidates only. Use this as the editing queue before adding public FML entries.

  • Shortlist candidates: 39

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; score 7): 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 / Tax (4)

  • 2026-09-02 - Billionaire strategy (Money Stuff: The ETF Dividend Flip; score 7): 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,…
  • 2026-09-02 - Dividend shuffle (Money Stuff: The ETF Dividend Flip; score 7): 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…
  • 2026-08-06 - The Harvard Undergraduate Consulting Group wastasked with looking for (Money Stuff: Fake SpaceX Stock Isn’t Worth as Much; score 7): 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…
  • 2026-08-04 - We have talked a few (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF; score 7): 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…

How Entities Work / Commercial Banks (2)

  • 2026-08-27 - Here’s “Why do borrowers make mortgage refinancing mistakes (Money Stuff: AI Refi; score 7): ,” 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…
  • 2026-08-04 - Last weekend Bloomberg’s Yiqin Shen published a fun story (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF; score 7): 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…

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; score 7): , 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 (1)

  • 2026-08-27 - Evergreen funds (Money Stuff: AI Refi; score 7): 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…

How Markets Work / Commodity Markets (4)

  • 2026-08-04 - Commodity market manipulation (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF; score 7): 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; score 7): 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 - The Commodity Exchange Actrequires the Commission to provide a uniform (Money Stuff: AI-Backed Securities; score 7): 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; score 7): 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 (6)

  • 2026-08-04 - And here we are! We talked last month about Section (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF; score 7): 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; score 7): 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; score 7): 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…
  • 2026-08-27 - We have talked about this a couple of times (Money Stuff: AI Refi; score 7): 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…
  • 2026-08-04 - We talked about crash insurance last week , and I (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF; score 7): 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…
  • 2026-09-02 - We talked on Monday about hedging KPIs . My basic (Money Stuff: The ETF Dividend Flip; score 7): 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…

Running Storylines / AI & Technology in Finance (12)

  • 2026-09-10 - A reader emailed me this tweet (from @GoatBots last (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities; score 7): 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…
  • 2026-08-25 - AI margin loans (Money Stuff: LeBron Bonds; score 7): 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; score 7): 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…
  • 2026-08-03 - And then Anthropic sort of supplanted OpenAI as the leading (Money Stuff: Hedgehog Hedge Fund; score 7): 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; score 7): 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…
  • 2026-08-27 - Anyway Bloomberg’s Jack Trapanick and Scott Carpenter report (Money Stuff: AI Refi; score 7): : 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…
  • 2026-09-10 - Anyway here’s a Wall Street Journal article about (Money Stuff: Dallas Gets Some Equities; score 7): 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…
  • 2026-08-25 - Broadcom Credit Risk Soars on Mega AI Debt Financing Backstops (Money Stuff: LeBron Bonds; score 7): . 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…
  • 2026-09-02 - Chevron to Invest $7 Billion Doubling Its Venezuelan Output (Money Stuff: The ETF Dividend Flip; score 7): . 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,…
  • 2026-08-04 - FBI crypto theft (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF; score 7): 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…
  • 2026-08-27 - Faster turnaround could double the percentage of eligible homeowners who (Money Stuff: AI Refi; score 7): 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,…
  • 2026-08-04 - Inside Google’s $200bn Wall Street finance machine (Money Stuff: Leveraged ETF Crash Hedging ETF; score 7): 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…

Running Storylines / Crypto & Digital Assets (4)

  • 2026-09-08 - And then there is “tokenization ”: I sell you a (Money Stuff: Robinhood Tokenized AMC; score 7): “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…
  • 2026-08-03 - Coldcard (Money Stuff: Hedgehog Hedge Fund; score 7): 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…
  • 2026-09-08 - Hunter Biden laptop memecoin (Money Stuff: Robinhood Tokenized AMC; score 7): 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; score 7): 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 (3)

  • 2026-08-10 - GameStop/eBay (Money Stuff: The Situation Is Fine; score 7): 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…
  • 2026-08-05 - Sports gambling: Robinhood (Money Stuff: SpaceX Unlocks Tomorrow; score 7): 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 - We talked on Thursday about prediction market tick (Money Stuff: The Situation Is Fine; score 7): 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…

Running Storylines / Private Markets Are the New Public Markets (1)

  • 2026-08-06 - SPVs (Money Stuff: Fake SpaceX Stock Isn’t Worth as Much; score 7): 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…