Musings are semi-long form, unfettered, random thoughts that pop into my head every now and then. Occasionally funny and hopefully informative, musings are my take on the happenings du jour.
Clear as mud
If you haven’t been hiding under a rock for the past ~5 months, you’ll know that there has been a bit of a kerfuffle in the regional banks, leading to 3 very dramatic bank failures, and a lot of uncertainty in regional bank stocks. What gives?
Safest Money
In the last few days of last week (week of March 6, 2023), Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) suffered a bank run. On Thursday alone, $42B of deposits fled the bank and on Friday, the bank was taken over by the FDIC. While not one of the big 4 banks, SVB was still a pretty big…
The stock market is forward looking
For the past few months, I have been working with my favorite financial journalist, Matt Levine of Bloomberg on a new series of podcasts that will be released all at once at a date to be announced. Here’s a sample of some choice clips.
Fairness
Some people are born with a silver spoon in their mouths, others inherit healthy trust funds or major companies and never need worry about money in their lives. Yet others strike the lottery, or stumble upon buried treasures in their backyards. How is any of these fair?
Recursive convergence model
There are many models of how stocks are priced, dealing with different aspects of pricing, and different pricing models. Intuitively, if 2 things are the same, then they should trade with the same price. But empirically, we know that they don’t always do that. Why not?
System design interview
As a fairly senior software engineer in a large tech company, I get asked to do interviews of new candidates very often. For some reason, most of the time, I get asked to do the dreaded “system design” question.
There’s going to be a bit of rambling in this post, but I promise, there is…
The Great Resignation
Beginning as early as Q1 2021, there was a lot of consternation from employers about an unusually large number of employees resigning. Coupled with a seemingly general lack of available candidates to fill in those empty roles, it seemed for the past year or so that a large number of workers just simply decided to…
4D chess
Sometimes, someone makes an argument so profound, so beyond my understanding, I just have to concede that they are playing 4D chess.
Something for nothing
It seems nowadays, just about everybody is complaining about the Federal Reserve’s “money printing” via Quantitative Easing (QE).
The Half-Off Dollar Company
Let me introduce you to the latest, and greatest new investment opportunity! It is a disruptor in the space of retail and ecommerce, growing its business at the unprecedented rate of 50% per month! Sales grow entirely linearly with investment into the business — this is basically an infinitely scaling sales machine!
Sentimentality and Profits
You’ll be excused for thinking the stock market is schizophrenic the past few weeks — one moment it is down, the next it is up, and often on the same day!
In an environment like that, how should the rational investor price stocks?
Price vs Value
Stocks are on sale, with almost all stocks down at least 5-8% from all time highs, with some tech stocks down as much as 80-90%.
Is now a good time to buy?
My Personal Portfolio
This is a discussion of how I think about my personal portfolio, and what I do with it.
Inflation model
QE, money printing, fiscal stimulus… inflation?! What is inflation? What determines how high inflation gets?
This is a discussion of my personal model of inflation and how it occurs.
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