Promoting Useful Knowledge

  I went into my office for the first time in over a year. My company is moving offices, so I went to gather my personal belongings, mostly junk. There were literally 5-10 small items that I thought about wanting to grab over the last year. The office was 99% empty. Mostly just security and building staff. The air on my floor was stale and warm. I’m glad I went in before the heat of summer. I did notice most desks were also exactly the same, and I feel bad for the women with a closet full of shoes under the desks. They’re going to need an international travel suitcase to move their desks. With all that, being in the office made me miss my colleagues a bit. We have a great working environment in our Times Square office, but I feel it will never be the same. People will go into the office less, and most of us will be like ships passing in the night. Not commuting 90 minutes each way to NY has been amazing, but this short visit to an empty office made me realize that I’ll probably be ...

  I love finance because you never know what is coming even when you think you do. Last week was quite a bit volatile across many markets. Whether it was the BoC becoming the first and maybe only hawkish central bank moving the Canadian Dollar and rates or Biden’s new tax plan moving nearly everything else. Lumber be damned, new home sales were amazing compared to estimates 1.02M vs 886K expected. This was the highest since 2006. Existing home sales weren't as strong as expected though, but not too far off. However, we saw a second negative number on the percent change side. Looks like those 2020 robust numbers pulled out a lot of the supply, just like a lot of other products. I had my eye on the BTC correction, and thought that it’s path sort of resembles the ‘Happy Gilmore’ plot. If you’ve never seen it, watch the trailer here . Now give me a little space here, you’ll see. Happy Gilmore is a guy that sees an opportunity to correct a problem by joining a long established, sort of ...

  There were a few major events that moved markets last week. CPI numbers came in much stronger than expected. Over the next few months we should continue to see these big numbers with the 2020 comparables being so terrible. Whether or not the CPI actually measures inflation effectively is one thing, but the market actually does react to it. Coinbase direct listing was widely followed. It opened pretty strong and rose 30% on the first day, but it didn’t close anywhere near the highs. It closed about 10% off it’s open and 20% off the highs, but still in positive territory from the listing price. The listing seemed to provide steam to Bitcoin, as it hit a new record high of $63,000 coming into the listing. In not so good news, the week it went public, Coinbase experienced an outage as did Robinhood’s crypto services. Perhaps the publicity of Coinbase or maybe the Dogecoin Tweets by Elon Musk drove a huge demand for trading these assets. J&J experienced a setback with its version ...