Degenerate Business School

Doubtless THE story of financial markets in 2023 has been the astonishing comeback of MegaTech. When rates went to zero during the pandemic, the explosion in Tech valuations made sense both in terms of mechanics and narrative. If discounted cash flows were governed by the 10-year rate, then companies like Apple became something like 100 year bounds. Look far enough into the future and it was hard to imagine how the likes of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and the like could fail. But then the Fe...

The Ancient Greeks used to say that Phobos, the God of Fear and Panic, ruled the battlefield. We might say the same of FOMO in the realm of financial markets. Even in the face of higher rates, an overblown debate about the debt ceiling and at least the theater of quantitative tightening, speculative fervor has returned once more to the American stock market. 2021 promised a revolution in Blockchain technology, whatever that means. And now 2023 foretells the end of human intelligence for ...

Over the past year, the S&P is down just 4%. In the world of equity markets, that is essentially...nowhere...a nothing burger. This on the heels of the Fed's most aggressive hiking campaign in living memory, one that began last March. Doubtless there have been puzzling rallies and plunges in between, a banking crisis, the makings of a bond market catastrophe and the looming debt ceiling debacle. But in the bigger picture, how do we account for the relative strength of the equity market in...

We spend a considerable amount of time on our silly little podcast agonizing over levels in the S&P 500. As we hover below 4,000, is the stock market overvalued or undervalued? Did the market bottom at 3,600 in October? Will this recession bring about the same relative decline as the Tech Bubble of 2001? But it bears reminding that levels are an illusion. Pop open a chart of the equity market over the last 20 years and you can't help but think the run-up is nonsensical. How could we ...

The halcyon days of quantitative easing made us all forget one simple truth. That in the annals of financial history, bank runs are numerous and inveterate. Like the coming of spring or another movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Except that the Great Financial Crisis did in practice, if not in law, change the game for all time. There are now 4 unimpeachable megabanks enameled with Too-Big-Too-Fail status and unlimited deposit insurance. And there are all the other banks, to which ...

We spend our days trying to guess which way financial markets will go, like medieval alchemists or broadcast news meteorologists. Is the bottom already in for the S&P and all degenerate risk assets? Where will rates go, and for how long? Is now the time to buy bonds? Does it even make sense to pick stocks?But why struggle, when staring us in the face for the first time in our investing lives, is a risk free rate of 4.4%. Plumb any mutual fund money market account from Fidelity or Blackroc...

With the S&P dithering in no man's land, we speculate on the implications of ChatGPT and its inevitable imitators. Needless to say it will trivialize the entire profession of data science. But will it become the greatest business-to-business software service in the history of capitalism?Next we discuss the re-emergence of short-dated options, and the potential consequences for market volatility.Lastly we wonder whether or not the zombie corpse of Bitcoin and Crypto assets writ large are b...

While the world's putative Illuminati gather in Davos, the S&P fails once more to escape its bear market structure. This in spite of some frisson over Netflix earnings and yet more bloodletting across Big Tech. Meanwhile Finance Twitter has begun to coalesce around a familiar narrative: over the next several years Emerging Market Equities will outperform the U.S. Thus we revisit one of our favorite topics. Will the emerging markets ever emerge? But this time, we turn to ChapGPT for h...

This week with inflation cooling off and the Federal Reserve balance sheet unchanged, the S&P 500 stretched to near 4,000. But Jerome Powell has made it clear that no rally can long endure, not while unemployment hovers near 3.5%. For now the structure of this bear market remains intact. What's more we closed last week with Implied Volatility (VIX) revisiting a 52 week low. All this to say that with another week of earnings looming and a debt limit fiasco on the horizon, all signs po...

We're back after a hiatus worthy of European aristocracy!Tesla, the last great hope of technology optimists everywhere, has at last succumbed to the Great Duration Bubble. From incomprehensible over-valuation to soul crushing underperformance, the likes of Crypto, the ARK innovation fund, Meta and now Tesla have all been deflated in their turn. And why? The Federal Reserve. Once the sponsor of the greatest financial binge in modern history, now the author of the most bloodthirsty tightening c...