At the beginning of each quarter, I prepare a short but in-depth conference call for RWM clients. Our team puts together the most revealing and informative slides. In that half hour, I blow through ~40 slides that capture and explain what is going on. About a quarter of the O … | Continue reading
For the first half of this year, I have steadfastly refused to join Club Recessionista. I have not believed we were already in a recession, and I was hopeful that a moderate Fed gradually raising rates to throttle inflation could execute that soft landing. No longer. As I men … | Continue reading
“I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our competition — but of our customers.” -Jeff Bezos, 1998 Amazon shareholder letter. We all know how much FAANMG stocks have faltered this year, but there is a bigger story brewing: … | Continue reading
Evolve or die. Every time a tech company capitulates to its audience and rolls back the future it’s a mistake. The best example being Netflix saying it was going to become a streaming company and the hoi polloi bitching that they still needed to rent DVDs by mail. Who’d want … | Continue reading
Wonky, but historically intreesting | Continue reading
“Enron has built a reputation as one of the world’s most innovative companies by attacking and atomising traditional industry structures.” -McKinsey report, published a few months before Enron’s collapse. > Rajat Gupta was more than a mere board member of Goldman Sachs, Procter & … | Continue reading
To hear an audio spoken word version of this post, click here. The Consumer Price Index print today of 6.2% is the highest print we have seen this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the highest print we see for this entire cycle. There has been enough ink spilled on … | Continue reading
When I was younger, I easily became infuriated at the assbackwardness of the world. It was frustrating to see all the waste, inefficiency and just downright idiocy wreak so much havoc on the people of planet earth. Over time, one mellows, acquires wisdom, and learns to shrug … | Continue reading
Every music single released has had a “B” side – in the physical format of 45s, there was space for a recording on the back of each vinyl single. Most are unremarkable, throwaways that merely fill the space before fading into obscurity. But not always: Some B-sides have achie … | Continue reading
The reactions to the two most recent major economic crises provide a wonderful laboratory to do a compare and contrast between different types of rescue policies. Consider if you will the government response to the great financial crisis (GFC) of 2008-09. To unfreeze credit m … | Continue reading
Forget that Elon Musk is crazy, forget the Wall Street valuations, GM or Ford must merge with Tesla or be permanently left behind, on the way to the scrap heap. It’s not where we are today, but where we are tomorrow. And twenty-five years of disruption tell us you can be too … | Continue reading
Counter party risk is something most people don’t really think about. Before we get into it, perhaps we should begin with a brief definition. “Counter party risk is the likelihood that the other party in an investment, credit, or trading transaction may not fulfill its part … | Continue reading
To hear an audio spoken word version of this post, click here. I published this in 2017 about people whose model of the world is off in some fundamental way. As it turns out, but for this minor error, they otherwise appear to be completely normal folks. This can apply to Fl … | Continue reading
This diagram of the organizational chart of various companies is from Nick Wingfield’s NYT tech column today, Microsoft Overhauls, the Apple Way. I find it both hilarious AND insightful: click for larger graghic BonkersWorld Source: Microsoft Overhauls, the Apple Way NICK … | Continue reading
When I was young and broke, carrying undergrad/grad school loans, I lived in Manhattan — an expensive city I could barely afford. My first apartment 17th street near 3rd Avenue was a three floor walk up studio at $400 per month. I moved into a two bedroom at 90 Lexington Avenue … | Continue reading
Sadly, One Letter Perfectly Captures the Recovery It is silly to use only one letter to describe the economy. This time, one letter seems to work. Bloomberg, September 2, 2020 Lots of discussion about a U, L or V economic recovery. Why is no one talking about a K recovery … | Continue reading
Many wealthy Americans insist they aren’t rich, and that has profound implications in electoral politics as well as economic policy. On July 11, MarketWatch published a letter, presumably real, from a reader complaining that she and her husband didn’t qualify for a stimulus p … | Continue reading
We live in a post-bailout world. It wasn’t always this way. Before the 1970s, America was not a bailout nation. For the first 200 years or so of our history, this country did not believe bail out specific companies. That changed in 1971, when defense contractor Lockheed received … | Continue reading
Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a witty and charmingly absurd bit of favorite sci-fi, begins with a great reveal to its protagonist, Arthur Dent: His friend Ford Prefect explains he is not a human, but is actually from a planet near the star Betelgeuse. Oh, and t … | Continue reading
Why So Many Tech Startups Misbehave When their business models are iffy, survival can depend on cutting corners. Bloomberg, February 11, 2020. It’s hard to miss how many technology companies engage in increasingly questionable — and occasionally reprehensible — conduct. Thi … | Continue reading
The latest risk supposedly precipitating a collapse of America is not the rise of Socialism; It is not Senators Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or even AOC. Medicaid for all will be expensive, and a guaranteed income will be costly – but they are not existential threats. It ain … | Continue reading
SoftBank’s Venture Capital Riches Swamp the Market The firm had too much money chasing too few deals. Bloomberg, September 23, 2019 It is late cycle in the era of unicorn madness. All that capital sloshing around looking for a home has made it easier for promising start-ups … | Continue reading
I’m going to play a minor trick on you today because the subject of my talk is the art of stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom. That enables me to start talking about worldly wisdom—a much broader topic that interests me because I think all too little of it … | Continue reading
Source: Jalopnik From this morning’s reads, comes this astonishing Jalopnik investigation into how the fares are split between the ride-hailing companies and drivers: “Jalopnik asked drivers to send us fare receipts showing a breakdown of how much the rider paid for the trip, h … | Continue reading
I am utterly fascinated by the concept of metacognition — how we evaluate and measure our own skills and abilities. This is the main idea underlying the Dunning-Kruger curve, the tendency for those with lower levels of competency to wildly over-estimate their own skill levels. T … | Continue reading
This is quite amazing via Bloomberg: “The industry that gave rise to investing titans Peter Lynch, Bill Miller and Bill Gross is facing an existential crisis. For years, mom-and-pop investors frustrated by high fees and subpar returns from big-name money managers have been shifti … | Continue reading
New Inequality Data Is a Gift to Campaign Sloganeers The Fed developed a data set that throws wealth disparities into high relief. Bloomberg, July 16, 2019 Studying wealth and income inequality has long been the stomping grounds of economists with the time and willingness t … | Continue reading
The Lotus Evija is a new electric super car. The horsepower is nearly 2000 HP, and the overall design is quite aggressive. The stats here are pretty wild: • 1972-hp output – World’s most powerful hyper-car; • 0-62 miles per hour in less than 3 seconds; • 4 motors (1 at each corne … | Continue reading
What are you doing for your long weekend? What are your expectations? I ask because we can improve our vacations via behavioral science. Not just our holiday travel, but our investing, consumer purchases, even our retirement planning. I’ll have more on that on Monday, but since t … | Continue reading
Source: How Much | Continue reading
Let Me Tell You How It Will Be . . . ’Cause I’m the Taxman Source: Bloomberg Yesterday, I mentioned that several billionaires who were not lefty socialists were noticing that the Middle Class was shrinking. It is clear to me that at least some of the 0.01% understand there is a … | Continue reading
A Latte a Day Isn’t Going to Ruin Your Retirement If spending $5 a day on fancy coffee puts your retirement at risk, you’ve got bigger problems. Bloomberg, April 3, 2019 Note: A milder version of this was published at Bloomberg earlier this week; that version failed to full … | Continue reading
If you’re running a small business in America and you need to borrow money, you may be forced to sign a “Confession of Judgment” – an obscure legal document that gives your lender the right to seize your assets with no trial or advance warning. Bloomberg reporters Zeke Faux and Z … | Continue reading
FYI: About the Amazon HQ2: Man, so many people are getting this wrong. No, Amazon did not pull out of the NYC deal – and a lot of people have done a terrible job trying to explain this. A few details that will make things clearer. 1/ — Barry Ritholtz (@ritholtz) February 15, 20 … | Continue reading
When I first saw this online, I grabbed a copy for my own use. Recently, I went back to reread part of it — and it was gone! Lucky I captured this before it disappeared. Enjoy. ~~~ The best investment advice you’ll never get By Mark Dowie San Francisco magazine, December 2006 … | Continue reading
I was reading an NBER paper about the political bias of analysts (more on this later) when I read about the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Partisan Conflict Index. Its a fascinating idea, one I had no idea this even existed: Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia … | Continue reading
Fascinating chart showing how rapidly the world population has urbanized: Source: Our World In Data You should really read the entire post at Our World In Data, but here is a short snippet: “More than half of the world’s population now live in urban areas — increasingly in … | Continue reading
This is a fascinating graphic, and of the analysis is correct, we have radically overstated if the American Dream is alive and well in this country: A revolution in genomics is creeping into economics. It allows us to say something we might have suspected, but could never confirm … | Continue reading
10 Things People Still Get Wrong About the Financial Crisis All are the result of bias, ignorance, laziness or bad faith. Bloomberg, September 14, 2018 One of the most intriguing aspects of the 2007-09 financial crisis is how little understanding there is of what actually o … | Continue reading
One Big Reason to Doubt Tech Has a Liberal Bias Above all, Silicon Valley’s denizens are capitalists and don’t want to alienate potential customers. Bloomberg, August 27, 2018. Warning investors not to get lost in their own filter bubbles is a regular plank of this column. … | Continue reading