My back-to-work morning train WFH reads:
• Trump’s More Than 3,700 Trades Astonish Wall Street Insiders: President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration. The President’s personal trading record, surfaced in disclosures, is itself a market-integrity story. Even by political-class standards, the activity level is remarkable. (Bloomberg/Yahoo Finance)
• Who wins and who loses from fewer corporate earnings reports:. Investors “have come to expect quarterly reporting and will exert pressure on companies to continue to provide quarterly reporting,” Erik Gerding, former director of corporate finance at the SEC. (Axios) see also Good Quarterly Earnings Behavior: Yours truly on what to actually do — and not do — during earnings season. Process beats prediction, every quarter. (The Big Picture)
• Secret Memos, Frantic Texts and Juicy Confessions From the OpenAI-Musk Trial: We sifted through evidence and testimony to figure out how billionaires Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman ended up in a courtroom. (Wall Street Journal)
• 50 Years of Stock Market Returns: Ben Carlson’s annual long-view table. Useful as a sanity check the next time someone tells you ‘this time it’s different.’ (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• The Rich Really Do Pay Lower Taxes Than You: The Saez/Zucman interactive still hits. Refreshed in the head whenever the ‘lazy rich aren’t taxed enough’ debate fires up again. (New York Times)
• Apple Is Making Hit Products and High Profits From Imperfect Chips: The company’s popular, $599 Neo laptop is just one of dozens of Apple devices that use lower-performing processors. (Wall Street Journal)
• The man they call Toad, and his lifetime collection of bikes that no-one wanted: A specialist’s lifetime collection, lovingly profiled. Almost everything about why hobbies matter is in this piece. The man they call Toad, and his lifetime collection of bikes that no-one wanted. (The Bike Shed Times)
• In northern Ukraine, it was boy vs. Russian drone. The boy won. A soldier taught a 12-year-old how to disable the fiber-optic drones that Russia has been using to hunt Ukrainian civilians in a campaign the U.N. has labeled a war crime. The ‘human safari’ phenomenon — Russian FPV drones hunting civilians on Ukrainian roads — has produced terrible footage and the occasional small victory. (Washington Post) see also Rumors of Instability in Moscow: Drone attacks, internet blackouts, and a sudden downturn in the economy have marked one of the worst stretches for Vladimir Putin since the start of the war in Ukraine. Kremlinology for the post-Wagner era. Reading the signals takes practice; this piece offers a useful framework. (New Yorker)
• YouTube taught a Japanese teen how to kick field goals. Now he’s in the NFL. Kansei Matsuzawa, 27, became the first Japanese-born player ever signed by an NFL team when he agreed to a deal as an undrafted free agent with the Raiders. A lovely ‘distance learning, applied’ story. Specialist positions are the most disrupt-able corner of pro sports. (NBC News)
• Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ comes to an ironic end: On the strange off-ramp for the late-night format. The economics killed the show; the politics gave the eulogy a louder coda. (Washington Post)
Video of the day: 7 Heritage Brands DESTROYED By Private Equity (And 5 That Survived)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Sheila Bair, former Chairperson of FDIC from 2006-11. She helped steer the agency through worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Her new book is aimed at young adults and teenagers, titled “How Not to Lose a Million Dollars”
In Credit Markets, Things Are Getting Better, Not Worse
Source: Apollo
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