Quoted
Has there ever been a better vehicle for turning a wise, independent crowd into a coordinated, clueless — even dangerous — mob than social media? Instantaneous, gamified, cheap, 24-hour trading now including “one-day funds” (Greifeld 2024) [5] on your smartphone after getting all your biases reinforced by exhortations on social media from randos and grifters with vaguely not-safe-for-work (NSFW) pseudonyms filtered and delivered to you by those companies’ algorithms which famously push people to further and further extremes. What could possibly go wrong?
Cliff Asness, “The Less-Efficient Market Hypothesis”
Books
The Missing Billionaires: A Guide to Better Financial Decisions — The title and author(s) are catnip to me, and for the most part I wasn’t disappointed. I think it’s helpful that both authors suffered severe, traumatic financial disasters earlier in their careers (one — the LTCM debacle — of generational importance; the other more prosaic). I also think this book could have been much, much shorter, and having co-authors seems to have exacerbated the need for a good editor. But overall this is a good book with several useful thoughts/frameworks.
Facts and Figures
“In 2019, one quarter of U.S. consumers shopped at Costco. Today it is nearly one-third.” (Source, including more gems like “Costco sells half of the world’s cashews”: How Costco Hacked the American Shopping Psyche)
99.9% — the decline in the share price of 23andMe from its $6 billion peak just after going public in 2021 (during the craziest of all speculative booms) to a current level of approximately $7 million. The current price coincides with the resignation of all seven independent directors after a protracted fight with the CEO and controlling shareholder over her plan to take the company private.
100 trillion — Amount of data in megabytes sent over cellular phone networks in 2023, approximately double the level of 2021.
$422,600 — the median U.S. home price, up from $266,300 in 2020.
Links
Greed, Gluttony and the Crackup of Red Lobster - How missed opportunities, a $1.5 billion real estate deal, all-you-can-eat shrimp and the global pandemic sank the country’s largest seafood chain. Pretty much every angle you’d want (or not) in a tale of corporate misadventures and mismanagement.
The Rise and Fall of a Green-Energy Superstar — Another interesting story of a business that went off the rails, with lessons from multiple angles.
There Are a Bazillion Possible Starbucks Orders — and It’s Killing the
Company. — This isn’t a full company-done-wrong article, promise, but it will be interesting to see how the new CEO addresses this problem.
Snow Belt to Sun Belt Migration: End of an Era? — This paper from the San Francisco Fed has some interesting data to support an interesting idea. Anecdotally, the recent tragic hurricane in the Southeast, drought and megafires in the West, and scorching heat in places like Phoenix (see below) would seem to agree. The paper’s main idea — “our findings suggest the ‘pivoting’ in the U.S. climate-migration correlation over the past 50 years is likely to continue, leading to a reversal of the 20th century snow belt to sun belt migration pattern” — will make sense to most people, but obviously it needs to be updated as the data continue to come in.
This could have gone in the “Facts & Figures” section, but it’s relevant to the Fed paper above. Phoenix is putting the finishing touches on a truly historic scorcher of a summer (using records dating to 1896), with numbers I can barely fathom.
66 days (and counting) of days at or above 110 degrees F. A truly unbelievable record of 117 degrees on September 29th (which shattered the previous record by nine degrees!!!) was followed by 113 degrees on September 30th. More days at or above 110F cannot be ruled out even as we go into October. The craziest part might be that until recently, a year with 30+ extreme-heat days was rare. The all-time records for days in a calendar year at or above 110F:
2024: 66 days (and counting)
2023: 55
2020: 53
2011: 33
2007: 32
2016: 30
A streak of 31 consecutive days at or above 110 degrees F. The entire month of July featured extreme heat.
A streak of 113 consecutive days at or above 100 degrees F. The previous record was just 76 days (!), set in 1993.
37 nights that did not cool below 90 degrees F. The previous record, set in 2021, was 28.