The following are some of the news items mentioned in March 2023:

  • Silvergate might go bankrupt
  • There is a long cramer and short cramer ETF now available via Tuttle capital management
  • Self managed supperannuation funds
    • Private superannuation funds with no more than six members that you can set up yourself.
    • Your employer will pay your superannuation guaratee into your SMSF, instad of a larger retail or industry fund, and you will be responsible for managing the investments in the fund
  • Australia’s DIY pension funds lose millions on crypto bets
  • Credut Suisse as of [2023-03-16 Thu] is valued at 10busd. Once it was valued at 100busd. Even in the depths of GFC, it was worth 20busd
  • LME warehouse had rocks in place of actual nickel and hence had to invalidate certain financial warrants
  • 17b usd of Additional Tier 1 debt was made worthless in the wake of CS collapse
  • Joe Biden vetoes bill for first time to block anti-esg measure
  • Federal Home Loan Bank system are a depression era backstop originally created to boost mortgage lending. The system is known as the lender of next-to-last resort
  • SVB has about 190busd of deposits and about 120 busd was invested in a portfolio of mostly Treasury and agency bonds
    • 42 busd of deposits fled the bank in one day
  • Some of the biggest banks are pausing AT1’s sales
  • Credit Suisse lost 110B in Q4 of 2022
  • SEC has made it clear many times that all crypto tokens are securities and exchanges need to register them with SEC
  • Coinbase does not run an SEC-registered securities exchange but it offers trading in a few hundred crypto tokens.
  • Regulating after a crypto crash seems pointless when the regulation should have been right through
  • SEC charges Justin Sun and three of his wholly own subsidiaries
  • Toshiba plans to go private in 15busd deal with japanese investors
  • First Citizens BancShares Inc. FCNCA buys Silicon Valley Bank
  • How many people work on AI in big tech companies ?
    • 33k in total
    • 10k in Amazon
    • 7k in MSFT
    • 5k in Google
  • Open AI has about 150 experts
  • CFTC sues Binance
  • Alibaba to split its 220B empire in to six units and each will explore its own IPOs
  • Reason SVB failed was operational and not financial
  • The prices of a bank’s CDS rise, indicating that its counterparties are no longer willing to lend to it - is no longer quite the sign of a bank distress that it was in 2008
  • McKinsey has a staff of about 47k in 2023. It has about 28k five years ago and 17k in 2012
  • McKinsey posted a record of 15busd in revenue in 2021
  • Schwab 7T empire is showing cracks
  • With normalization policy that might be pursued, a flood of money 3.9T might flow back to Japan
  • US banks are losing money to money market funds
  • RBA has raised rates by 3.5 percentage points in 10 straight hikes in the period between May and March, its most aggressive tightening cycle since 1989
  • Analogy between baseball and investing. Quants have analyzed baseball stats to death and the result is that we now see a game that has very little action and excitement. In the world of investing, the ETFs and Smart Beta ETFs have taken the wind out of active management.
  • The main takeaway is that efficacy is declining over the long term. Nobody is saying these concepts aren’t relevant. They all still matter. But as soon as a particular definition becomes prevalent and widely used, there’s more attention to it and that factor begins to atrophy
  • Fed said no to Narrow banking concept but the very fact that there are money market funds that allow the same thing to happen means that there will be increasingly pressure on local banks
  • In NY cirty, one in 11 jobs are directly or indirectly tied to the financial sector
  • Average Wall Street Bonus plunges 26% to 175k USD
  • Worldwide, Corona virus killed 7 million people. More than a million of those deaths occurred in US alone
  • Elon Musk and an array of public figures have signed theirnames to an open letter that went viral, calling for a six month pause on training language models more powerful than GPT-4
  • If the late 1990s boom was defined by the phrase “irrational exuberance”, then the low-interest rate era has been emblematic of irrational pessimism.
  • JP Morgan says recession is inenvitable by end of 2023
  • College consultants are charging 750k to build standout applications starting in seventh grade.
  • Acceptance rates for undergrads in Ivy ranges from 3.4% to 5%