Urban Trade Breakdowns

On June 28th, 1997, just seven months after shocking the boxing world by defeating Mike Tyson by TKO in the 11th round, Evander Holyfield was back in Las Vegas to defend his title in one of most anticipated rematches in boxing history. Holyfield was a hugely experienced fighter and a meticulous trainer and in preparation for the fight, his team analyzed virtually every element of Tyson’s style and developed a grueling training program and a brilliant fight plan. He was never more prepared, but the smart-money oddsmakers in Vegas saw things different, predicting a Tyson win at 4:1 odds. But sometimes, shit just gets crazy, and when it does, you can throw away the fucking odds, because some shit is just too un-real to predict. Until it happens. With 40 seconds remaining in the third round, while brawling through through an ugly clinch against the ropes, Tyson shoves his head across Holyfield’s face and bites an inch-long chunk of cartilage from the top of Holyfield’s right ear. T...

Before 1776, you didn’t need to know math and shit to understand economics. Because back then, if a country was 1/3 of the world’s population (like India in year 1 AD), it was roughly 1/3 of the global economy. And if a country had 1/4 of the world’s population (like China at the time), it was roughly 1/4 of the global economy. Because before tractors and electricity and shit were invented during the industrial revolution, which was in full swing by 1776, a motherfucker could only hunt or gather or grow so much shit on any given plot of land. If a country ran out of land, it ran out of food, and its people starved, which kept both population and economic growth in check. And that explains all that old world raping and pillaging and conquering of land, because up to that point, economic growth meant pretty much one thing, more land. But after the industrial revolution, a motherfucker could grow or produce a shit-ton more on any given plot of land, which meant if you could out-think and...

The world is a crazy-ass place. Every day, all day, we get slammed with zillions of bits of information and our little monkey brains, which evolved to keep us alive just long enough to fuck and create the next generation of fuckers, just can’t keep up. So to make sense of the shit, we tell ourselves stories, cheat-sheet versions of reality to make the shit simple so we can pass the test and live another day. And when enough people buy into the story, the story starts to influence reality and it starts a feedback loop that continues until reality intervenes. But the stories are never real. Reality is fucking infinite-K HD and we can’t even see past the color red. We don’t have the hardware or software to process the shit. But what we can know for sure is when we are wrong. Wrong pops the bubble, it curb-stomps our stories. People tell stories until reality proves us wrong. That’s the law of the jungle, and if you want to survive in the jungle, a mans got to have a code. George Soros ...

I  never liked the use of the word “investor” in the financial press. I find it offensive. If you were to create a word-cloud visualization of the language used on wsb, I bet “investor” is largely absent or in the very fine print. And that’s because no one pretends wsb is an investment forum. Investment forums are fucking boring. Jack Bogle and all that shit. Diversification and low-fee indexes. Fucking AOL shit. So when Charlie Munger, the co-godfather of boring-ass value investing says “I would be comfortable putting 100% of my net-worth into one stock”, what the fuck does that mean? I mean, he’s old as fuck so maybe that’s just ancient crazy talk. Way back in our Magnavox black-and-white vacuum tube history, before algo trading and 401K’s and QE, the market was way easier, right? Back in those days, you could buy a railroad stock in a booming economy growing 30% a year and throwing off shitloads of free cash flow at a PE of 2. Well duh, I’d do that too. But today, with the S...

To trade money is one thing. But to actually create money, then trade it, well, that’s a whole ‘nother thing. And being the equal opportunity lover of trading stories that I am, I gotta say something about crypto. So… Money is old as fuck. In 5000 BC people started using metal for trade and by 700 BC our ancestors were minting coins. It took another thousand plus years for paper money to catch on, first in Tang Dynasty China (whatever the fuck that is), as private bills of sale (whatever the fuck those are), and then another thousand years for governments to guarantee the value of a printed piece of paper. But when this happened, it became known as cash money. And for a long-ass time, if you did some work, you wanted cash money for your efforts. And when everyone wanted cash money, cash money was the only game in town. Meanwhile, shit progressed. We go from flint to matches to steam engines to power grids, and along the way, say about 1952, some smart ass motherfuckers figure out ...

For Qin Kang, The summer after graduation sucked ass.  With a newly minted degree in marketing from a mid-tier university near Beijing, Qin moved in with his Aunt in a small apartment on the third ring and begin his search for an entry-level internship with a tech firm.  But after three months of chasing down leads and scrolling through job postings and submitting applications, he got all of 5 interviews and no offers.  By mid-August he stopped looking and basically spent his days playing Honor of Kings and checking out the chicks on Tantan.   And like every competitive job market for new graduates, there is always one shit post that seems to pop up everywhere.  This is because the algos know desperation when they see it and for Qin and thousands like him in the summer of 2019, one shit-post ad stalked their digital lives: a link to apply for an entry-level paid internship as a “Cafe Statistician” for a boutique staffing firm doing field market research in the “...

On one level, banking is a simple business. People give the banks free money in exchange for no-fee ATM access and a government guarantee they will get at least some of it back. The banks then pay people slightly above minimum wage to lend this money back to our debt-loving asses to fund low margin businesses and buy shit we cannot afford, all at an interest rate inversely proportionate to one’s social class. But if a bank wants in on this FDIC-guaranteed free money hustle, they gotta follow a few rules. For example, they can’t threaten to put a cap in your sister’s ass if you can’t pay them back, and this results in the occasional loan-loss. Additionally, the FDIC has an image to protect, and so as much as possible they try and limit the lending of any of this free money to white people who qualify for credit cards and TSA-pre. But there are only so many borrowers like this left in America, so the government created another free money system with no real restrictions on who gets t...

If you are of American or European decent, your great grandparents lived through some crazy-ass shit. From 1914 to 1918, 16m of those fuckers died over a bunch of old-school European bullshit. Then Spanish flu hits (it’s like the flu, but you die) and another 50–150m people bounce. But when all that ended, shit got really good.  We Americans had all these factories and roads and harbors that we used to build shit for the war, the US was owed shitloads of money from the countries that did the killing and they now needed our shit to rebuild their shit. With everyone working, the money started pouring in, which we used to buy cars, phonographs, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and all the shit Americans need to survive. And the stock market went parabolic. The DJIA went up over 600% in about 8 years and being the greedy motherfuckers we are, we went all-in on the shit, investing our life savings, mortgaging our houses, selling our parents silverware, pimping our sisters, and just dum...