The famous George Soros quote is “When I see a bubble forming, I rush in to buy, adding fuel to the fire.” If you watched the stock of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. go up 116% last week, on not much news, you might rationally think “boy I wish I had a ton of AMC stock to sell to all these crazy…

I feel like I don’t yet entirely understand what went wrong at Greensill Capital. Greensill, the story goes, was a leader in the business of supply-chain finance, in which it would insert itself between buyers and sellers of products, paying the sellers a bit early (but at a discount) and collecting…

Yesterday many big retail brokerage firms told their customers that they would no longer be able to buy GameStop Corp. stock because it was getting too crazy. This led to a lot of outrage from people who are famous and online: Among others rebuking the moves by the brokerages were Rep. Alexandria…

Hi! It’s been a while. This column has been on hiatus since August as I have been on parental leave. I am back now. A lot of news has happened since August. Also, I am aware that there are a lot of new readers here, for reasons. Welcome! I thought that, for this first week, we might ease back into…

Historical context on the important themes impacting financial markets today. View this email in your browser Financial History: Sunday Reads Speculation & Innovation By Jamie Catherwood on Aug 09, 20

July 2020 One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degreeand aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinatesystem whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-mi

You know the theory. Common ownership of multiple companies in the same industry by big diversified institutional investors should cause the companies to compete less: If all their profits are going to the same place (the investors who own all of them), then no one should care about which particular…

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mi

Throughout my life I never paid too much attention to health, exercise, diet or nutrition. I knew that you’re supposed to get some exercise and eat vegetables or something, but it stopped at that (“mo

One company that may have a promising lead on a Covid-19 vaccine is Moderna Inc., a U.S. biotechnology firm that we talked about on Tuesday. A Covid-19 vaccine would be a very good thing, and the market has been following Moderna’s work with great interest. Its stock is up about 240% this year. It…

On first principles it is not that surprising that the price of oil would be negative. I mean, look at it. It’s a viscous liquid. It smells bad. It is toxic. If you kept it in your garage, you might get sick, or you might get in trouble for storing pollutants improperly, or your garage might…

The popular stereotype of how SoftBank Group Corp. and its $100 billion Vision Fund work goes something like this. There are a handful of startups competing in some new sector. SoftBank swoops in and funds one of them with much, much more money than it wants. The infusion of SoftBank cash gives the…

What I should do is launch the Money Stuff S&P ESG Fund, a mutual fund whose stated mission would be to invest in the 500 companies in the S&P 500 index with the best environmental, social and governance ratings judged by my proprietary rating system. Don’t worry too much about how that system…