10 Tuesday AM Reads
My Two-for-Tuesday morning
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Archegos Appeared, Then Vanished Start with a lot of money. Borrow a lot more money. Use all that money to buy a ton of small stocks, cornering the market and pushing up their prices. Prices go up, you have more equity your positions automatically deleverage. You use that to borrow more money and plow it back into those stocks, pushing them up more. Repeat forever? (Bloomberg)
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Purposeless Capital Money without a goal is mere lucre. Capital without a purpose is simply currency awaiting mischief. Without a purpose, money is merely an entry in an accounting ledger. But capital tied to a useful purpose has magical powers. (The Big Picture)
10 Sunday Reads
Avert your eyes! My
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The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man In this crowded field of wrongness, one voice stands out. The voice of Alex Berenson: the former New York Times reporter, Yale-educated novelist, avid tweeter, online essayist, and all-around pandemic gadfly. Berenson has been serving up COVID-19 hot takes for the past year, blithely predicting that the United States would not reach 500,000 deaths (we’ve surpassed 550,000) and arguing that cloth and surgical masks can’t protect against the coronavirus (yes, they can). (The Atlantic)
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Which world leader has the worst pandemic record? The competition is fierce Populism seems to be a comorbidity in a pandemic, raising its deadly toll. It’s impossible to cover all the outrages by populist demagogues and assorted tyrants. Every world leader made mistakes, but there’s something uniquely malignant about the manipulations and deceptions of the most outrageous players.(Washingt
This week, we speak with Shirl Penny, founder and CEO of Dynasty Financial Partners. Penny has a somewhat unusual background; he was recently named to 40 under 40 list. Dynasty has 50 RIA offices, 250 advisors + over $60B in assets on their platform.
Penny tells of his humble roots, being raised by his step-grandfather in a fishing village in Maine. After college, he interviewed at Smith Barney, and experienced a series of firsts: His first escalator, first revolving door and first airplane flight. He stayed at Smith Barney for more than a decade.
He explains the four businesses Dynasty manages, the largest of which is running the back office for 50 RIAs. The firm handles everything from payroll, compliance, marketing and investing for these firms. This allows the advisors to focus on what they do best, while letting Dynasty handle the administrative functions. They have become the leading platform provider for breakaway brokers. He likens what they do to “
10 Weekend Reads - The Big Picture ritholtz.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from ritholtz.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
10 Good Friday AM Reads April 2, 2021 6:45am by Barry Ritholtz
My Good Friday, Great 3 day weekend morning reads:
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How Food Banks Succeeded and What They Need Now America’s charitable food banks take pride in what they’ve accomplished over the past year, and the numbers justify it: They distributed roughly 50 percent more food in 2020 compared with 2019, a considerable portion to first-time visitors. They served millions of people even as they dealt with supply-chain interruptions and health risks for their volunteers and employees. (New York Times)
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The Best Part of Life in the 21st Century? Not Being Dead A surfeit of ways to die: Crop failure meant starvation. Constant wars might have killed us. If disease didn’t get us, there was a pretty good chance famine, war, and conquest would. Diseases took a lot of people. The elements would have taken more. Scenarios our ancestors would have routinely found life-threatening