2023-01-07 Site Updates

CategoriesIssue Jan'23, Site Updates & News.

Introducing print style of editions. Going forward I’ll try to make every edition look good when printed, and have a page that looks good in black and white, not too lengthy, and doesn’t have too many pictures. Printing pictures consumes a lot of ink.

Obviously, absolutely everything is under construction, including pages in production. But I think I’m making good progress. This is also the fastest way to iterate: just make changes, and push them live. None of that two-week deployment cycle that gets stuck, and a month later, you still haven’t deployed your work for whatever reason. Only large enterprises can afford that, I can’t.

In any case, the “issue navigator” on the top gains (P) links, which are the links to printable pages. Or pages that will eventually be printable and good-looking.

On a side note, dealing with wordpress sometimes makes me want to pull my hair out (if I have any), and I can’t believe that a third of the internet runs on it.

Of course, I’d like to end this monologue on a bright note, so here is a picture of… please welcome… Capt’n Bootstraps!

Let’s All Dance the Melvin Superswap

CategoriesGamestop., Issue Jan'23

u/Dr_Gingerballs writes:

Howdy Ape-areenos,

I just got around to watching the 2 part GME series on HBO MAX titled Gaming Wall Street, and it was refreshing to see our side of the story told authentically after a year of gaslighting by the media. I know that the issue is complicated and it’s hard to create and sustain a captive audience around complex financial instruments. However, it did not sit well with me that I finished the series with no real idea of any tangible, targeted requests that the general public could make to reform wall street. Sending a letter to your senator saying the market is corrupt and it needs reform is simply too vague to take action. It also did not sit well with me that the story ended with the narrator throwing up their hands and saying that maybe Melvin swapped out the liability somehow, and no one really knows what is going on. I think the research done in this sub paints a pretty compelling picture of what happened, and there are signatures of it all over the data that we do have access to.

I hope that this post sheds more light on these swaps, and allows the broader community to begin to understand what is going on here. This work builds off of some great DD by others in the community, namely u/Zinko83 and u/Mauerastronaut on variance swaps. As with all of my posts, it would not be possible without the efforts of the group of people that u/Gherkinit compiled in the community to investigate the derivatives used on GME. Without the rule documenting, data collecting, and derivative investigating done by this group, I would not be able to write this post.

Let’s start where the documentary left off.

Continue reading “Let’s All Dance the Melvin Superswap”

A review of Aswath Damodaran’s youtube channel about accounting

CategoriesFinance_, Issue Jan'23, Site Updates & News.
tl;dr: 2/5 would not recommend

Hello everyone! In the following traktat I review Aswath Damodaran’s youtube channel, which can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/@AswathDamodaranonValuation

Intro

In my journey of Looking for Answers (TM), in my quest for gaining understanding of micro and macro money systems, I’ve been watching a lot of youtube videos, some are excellent (Thanks George Gammon!), some less so. Aswath’s channel has been bookmarked in my brave browser for more than a year, and I gave it another try.

I figure, I should post my review of his channel here on my blog as well, because youtube does not have a nice framework in place for having a discourse. Comments just get lost. To save the time I spent on analysis and the write up, I’m saving my comment here – with pictures!

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Bed Bath & Beyond Warns It May Go Out of Business

CategoriesIssue Jan'23, Site Updates & News., World Finance News_
with some additional commentary by me

This is sad for us, retailers. We dont want Amazon devouring the entire physical (and digital) economy. We don’t want Wall St devouring Main St.

What happens is that operating normally is just not profitable. Amazon took all the brick and mortar shops out of business – but Amazon’s physical store itself is not profitable, either. Only their AWS branch (digital services) has been profitable lately. So in this “everything squeeze,” it appears more and more that normal operations are not profitable, for anybody.

And if a business entity finds a way to be profitable, the market adjusts quickly (weeks? months? years?) to reduce margins to near-zero, and profit disappears again. Of course, the question is: what do we do now? And how to operate in such conditions? And that, my friends, will be a topic for a future lengthy article (or several).

U.S. DOJ in process of seizing Robinhood shares tied to Alameda Research loans

CategoriesIssue Jan'23, The Crypto Unraveling_

WILMINGTON, Del., Jan 4 (Reuters) – U.S. prosecutors told a U.S. judge on Wednesday they are in the process of seizing shares of Robinhood Markets Inc that were allegedly pledged as collateral for loans to Alameda Research, which was founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, who has been charged in the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. (Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware Editing by Chris Reese)

You can read the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/article/fintech-crypto-ftx-bankruptcy-robinhood-idUSL1N33P1MY

Unfortunate… Crypto firm Wyre winding down after failed Bolt deal

CategoriesIssue Jan'23, The Crypto Unraveling_

Wyre, the crypto payments company once valued at $1.5 billion, has told employees that it is shutting down.

Why it matters: The company is yet another victim of the crypto crash and broad market slump.

Details: “We’ll continue to do everything we can, but I want everyone to brace themselves for the fact that we will need to unwind the business over the next couple of weeks,” CEO Ioannis Giannaros wrote in an email to employees, a portion of which was seen by Axios.

Continue reading “Unfortunate… Crypto firm Wyre winding down after failed Bolt deal”