Stocks
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No Mercy No Malice
Proof that kindness compounds over the long term
As the news keeps thrusting the CEO of Robinhood in my face, I have two thoughts. One: Is the Javier Bardem No Country for Old Men hairstyle back in vogue? And two: Investing in — and holding — stocks has changed my life profoundly. …
The first-ever options trader discovered a key insight about the nature of risk — and how to profit from it
An epic amount of ink has been spilled over the past few weeks about Reddit’s WallStreetBets and wild trading of options for meme stocks like GameStop. Much of this ink describes meme stocks as a unique phenomenon with little or no precedent. But the history of the financial markets is actually filled with precedents for meme stocks. Sure, nobody was buying stock in video game retail companies in ancient Greece. But believe it or not, the very first option trader in ancient Greece blazed a trail followed by Gamestonkers. …
Off Brand
The rebel boot persisted — even when no one was wearing shoes
A hip, young marketer at a hip, young agency once admitted to me something memorable. Getting a cool new brand off the ground wasn’t really the hard part of his job, he told me. What was hard was making that coolness sustainable. He compared it to opening a trendy restaurant: What happens when the trend fades? “There are always lots of new places, and people love to try them out,” he said. “But what you really want to be is the one they keep coming back to, year after year. …
Number of the Day
VCs can’t seem to stop pumping more money into the stock-trading startup during the pandemic
$1.25 billion: That’s how much stock-trading startup Robinhood has raised from financial backers this year, per Fox Business News.
It’s been a transformative year for Robinhood, the easy-to-use stock-trading app that we profiled in June. Back then, despite an embarrassing string of outages on important trading days, the company was emerging as a surprising pandemic-era star. It had just raised a fresh round of capital, and was drawing the attention of bored and locked-down young professionals looking for a distraction in the absence of sports.
Since then, Robinhood’s profile has continued to rise — and notwithstanding its association with brutal…
How did the coffee behemoth get left behind in the pandemic?
In early 2007, the world seemed partly owned by Starbucks. It did not matter what country you were in, or what direction you walked — everywhere you were sooner or later bound to encounter one of the company’s outlets, habitués lined up, sometimes out the door, for some version of their four-dollar iced or frothed coffee. Inside would be a similar scene — laptops out at some tables, pals gabbing away at others, a cross-generational crowd drawn by one of the most iconic, desired, and ubiquitous brands of the era.
But Howard Schultz, the company’s visionary and former CEO, saw…
Analysts are split about the top-performing remote work stock
Zoom has become a household company overnight, vaulted from a teleconferencing company “powering business meetings” to a lifeline for millions of workers, families, and friends. Since last December, its user base has grown from less than 10 million daily meeting participants to over 300 million daily (as of late April). Its stock is up over 200% year-to-date.
The $8.3 billion stock trading startup fumbled into the financial crisis — and is now winning it
If there was a day everything changed for stock traders, it was Monday, March 2. The prior week, a Centers for Disease Control official warned that as the coronavirus pandemic sweeping Asia and Europe spread in the U.S., “disruption to everyday life may be severe.” China reported 202 new Covid-19 cases, bringing the total there to more than 80,000 despite massive lockdowns. Hundreds of new cases were confirmed in Italy; deaths were reported from Australia to South Korea; and cases in the U.S. tipped past 100. The S&P 500 had fallen for five straight days, plunging nearly 10% on spiking…
Why is the quarantine-friendly company’s stock suddenly tanking?
You might figure that if the Covid-19 pandemic causes lots of people to dump their gym memberships in favor of more quarantine-friendly fitness options, then Peloton — maker of a fancy stationary bike loaded with subscription streaming exercise programming — would benefit. You would not be alone: Plenty of stock-pickers have made precisely this argument in recent weeks, recommending PTON shares as an example of “Stay-at-home stocks that could weather the coronavirus.”
But, in fact, its share price has fallen in the last five days from about $23.30 to about $18.30 — roughly 17%, which is even worse than the…
Between the Lines
Fraud is just a particularly dishonest form of short-term borrowing
It’s always sad when a bull market ends, but there are two tragedies: The textbook tragedy, in which a lot of people lose money; and the more novelistic one, in which a few people have their reputations utterly ruined.
In 1929, at the height of the crash, WASP establishment icon Richard Whitney strode onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and placed large buy orders for U.S. Steel and other major companies. He was backed by the Morgan interests and was doing what J.P. Morgan himself had done a generation earlier. …
