My mid-week morning train WFH reads:
• The GameStop Game Never Stops How GME exploded: Some people think GameStop is primed for a turnaround. One of those people is Ryan Cohen, the former chief executive officer of Chewy Inc., the online pet-food retailer. If you can sell pet food online, you can sell video games online. (Bloomberg) see also The Gamma Algo is Different The curation algorithms of TikTok, Reddit, Robinhood, Amazon & Netflix are designed not to do anything good for you the consumer but to keep you engaged on the platform you happened to launch from your phone. Once your TikTok feed is full of stock tips, you’re going to get the most sensational, clickbait posts bubbled to the top of your window. (ETF Trends)
• Is Your 401(k) Colluding To Make Cereal More Expensive? Kellogg’s cereal prices serve as a kind of counterfactual to test if the other big cereal companies are behaving differently. While the other cereal makers’ biggest shareholders are Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, Kellogg’s biggest shareholder is far and away the W. K. Kellogg Foundation Trust, which owns almost a quarter of the entire company. It doesn’t own a share in the other cereal brands, so it should only really care about Kellogg’s profits. (NPR)
• Who Owns Stocks? Explaining the Rise in Inequality During the Pandemic Bad economies usually hurt both workers and investors. Only the first part has been true this time. (Upshot)
• Yellen Passed the Economic Stability Baton to Powell. Now, He’s Handing It Back. Their shared history and views set the stage for the closest working relationship between the Fed and Treasury in years (Wall Street Journal)
• How a Penny Stock Explodes From Obscurity to 451% Gains Via Chat Forums It was 12:43 a.m. on Jan. 19, and TRGainz, a frequent user of the social media platform Stocktwits, was getting antsy. So too was Alwaysliquid. “Can’t sleep,” he shot back seconds later. 9 hours later, financial markets would open in New York, and when they did, an obscure penny stock by the name of Blue Sphere Corp. would suddenly, and seemingly miraculously, soar, handing a windfall of $30 million to those who had loaded up on the stock before. (Bloomberg)
• It Seems Money Does Buy Happiness After All A study refutes the theory that above a certain income level dollars don’t help your sense of well-being. (Businessweek)
• 200 Lemons, 30 Bananas: Online Shoppers Accidentally Buy Too Much Novices who overbuy get creative with their cooking; ‘I salted them, I sugared them, I stewed them and I juiced them’ (Wall Street Journal)
• Competence is Joe Biden’s best strategy Democrats have to prove that government can work — and Republicans are determined to prove the opposite. (Financial Times)
• A Witness to History and Bernie Sanders in His Mittens Brendan Smialowski, a photojournalist for Agence France-Presse, shot the image of a bundled Mr. Sanders that spawned a multitude of memes on Inauguration Day. (New York Times)
• The UCSF-led team racing to find a Cancer cure may have found a promising candidate to cure COVID-19: Cancer drug Aplidin that kills the coronavirus in lab studies and is 30 times more potent than Remdesivir (San Francisco Chronicle) see also New Playbook for Covid-19 Protection Emerges After Year of Study, Missteps Mask-wearing, good air flow and frequent rapid tests are more important than surface cleaning, temperature checks and plexiglass. America needs to double down on protection protocols as potentially more-contagious coronavirus variants take hold. (Wall Street Journal)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Andrew Beer, Founder and Managing Member of Dynamic Beta investments. The firm manages several ETFs that seek to replicate illiquid alternatives at lower costs, with full transparency and daily liquidity. Their hedge fund replication fund, iM DBi Long Short Hedge Strategy ETF (DBEH) is up 27.7% since it launched in December 2019.
COVID curbed carbon emissions in 2020 — but not by much
Source: Nature
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