Buy The Dip: Ackman vs Bateman, Jane Street and data-caused mental breakdowns
A rough FT Alphaville taxonomy
Hello again!
Thanks to everyone who didn’t instantly hit the unsubscribe button last week, and everyone who actually voluntarily (!) signed up. Some kind souls even pledged some money for a paid version. But don’t worry: BTD/BTFD will stay priced in line with its value (ie free).
Apropos my day job… FT Alphaville tries to mix things up between daily quick-hit blogging, deep dives into often geeky subjects, and odder stuff that some (not always unfairly) might describe as shitposting. Because finance and economics is – as I repeatedly insist to my dubious offspring – genuinely interesting and fun as well as important.
The first includes writing about interesting news, market moves or fresh economic data, digging into sellside reports, some unusually cool academic research, or simply publishing a “balance sheet” that Matt Levine memorably called “full of the howling of ghosts and the shrieking of tortured souls”. We sometimes call the second category “effortposts”, which includes things like exploring the details of SVB’s interest rate hedging strategy or the exploits of an Italian billionaire you’ve never heard of. A good example of the third category is this exhaustive investigation into whether David Solomon is actually any good at DJing (though that also took some effort).
(NB, not actually DJ-Sol)
A lot of what we do obviously defies these loose categories, and some of our best stuff falls into all three. We also supplement our own output with some very selective guests posts by people with expertise in subjects that are just far too nerdy to run in mainstream comment pages.
But this week we published something squarely in shitposting territory: a quiz for readers to guess who said something, Bill Ackman or Patrick Bateman.
But of (slightly) more serious note, this week we also wrote about…
– Jane Street’s extraordinary results. If you want to make filthy retire-before-40 lucre, the best way to do it these days is to learn OCAML and work for Jane Street, not Goldman Sachs, Google or Blackstone.
– The ECB’s digital currency project, and the impact it might have on the European banking system.
– The secular 40-year collapse in the US mood, as this fascinating paper exploring the sentiment expressed in 170 years of American newspapers showed.
– Business development companies, and the fascinating window they offer into the opaque private credit world.
– The toxic co-dependency between private equity and public markets, both of which need each other more than either party will admit.
– The original Brady Plan, and whether some new iteration could help the developing world.
– The bitcoin ETF X/Twitter shenanigans, the actual bitcoin ETFs now trading or about to trade, and what banks make of it all. [deep existential sigh]
– The dangers of QT and the Treasury basis trade, as balance sheet run-off threatens to rattle funding for the highly-leveraged strategy.
– Jupiter Asset Management’s loss of a star trader, and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad trends confronting the traditional investment industry.
– The coming year of rate cuts, which economists forecast is going to be a big one.
– The Boeing mess, in particular the impact on the company’s cash flow and debt payments.
– And finally, an initially innocuous post that nearly gave one of my colleagues a mental breakdown: a running chart showing the biggest UK listed companies since 1996.
You know you’re in data hell when this shows up:
Next week I’ll try to write something about my latest book project (plus throw in a few more FTAV links). Here is a taster:
