Promoting Useful Knowledge

Austria announced a full national lockdown because of an increase in COVID cases and Germany put new mandates on unvaccinated people. This seems to have weighed on global equity markets, though were mostly up small on the week. The SPX recorded it’s 66th record close this year. Most of Asia was up as well, but Europe, LATAM, Canada, and US Small-caps were lower. My favorite story of last week was Ken Griffin outbidding a DAO of crypto investors trying to buy a copy of the US Constitution . The bill came to $43.2M for Ken. That’s expensive, but I’m happy he paid up. I did not want to hear nonstop about how this was the next way for individuals to band together to take it to the rich. The worst story of the week was Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) and Jeff Merkley (OR) voicing displeasure with Fed Chair Jermone Powell. For his ability to fight inflation or unemployment? Nope, but because of his commitment, or lack thereof, in fighting climate change. Huh? This is why I lose m...

  Quite the weird week there last week. All year we’ve been hearing of mergers and IPOs, but last week we saw three mammoth break ups announced. Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, and Toshiba each said that they will split up their business lines. These are bigger than Tom Brady leaving New England or Bill and Melinda Gates splitting up. It seems each no longer subscribed to the bigger is better theme. It might also be because investors are valuing the entire businesses with the multiples of their legacy stodgy units and not the new growth businesses they are trying to foster. Each of the stocks jumped on the news, but then traded off from the positive initial reaction. We’ll see how these break ups go, but I wonder if the executives of the cast off divisions are watching Romcom movies and eating ice cream. Elon Musk continues his shenanigans on Twitter by posting a poll on whether he should sell stock. The poll ended with 58% saying “yes”, so he ended up selling $5B worth o...

  There seems to be a lot of change going on in the last few years. Since COVID, things have accelerated quite a bit. Many of the articles shared below have a theme around change. It’s just a different flavor for each. I think Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’ is pretty appropriate for this period. As you read in Raoul’s post below, we are going through a period of change. Dylan notes, ‘as the loser now, will be later to win.’ Dylan wrote in a period of cultural change and the civil rights movement. This movement I'm speaking of is more about the financial aspects of life. I did not see things playing out like this in the US equity markets this week. Disappointing numbers coming out of some of the mega-caps. As high as they’ve been flying, that is not that unexpected, but for the market to shake that off and push to new highs was surprising. In global markets, the rest of the Americas traded lower, most were in the green in Europe, and all major Asian indices were down for...