Nice article from @MESandbu. This from a theme in sellside research before Christmas. Could the pandemic break secular stagnation & deliver a decade of strong growth?

🚨🚨 THREAD TIME 🚨🚨

let's talk about the differences between income, wealth, and class

tl;dr: income is earned, wealth is bought, and class is inherited

also hi friends, while on the topic of income, this work is my only source of it! times are tough and folks are really struggling, but if you have a couple extra bucks please consider sending a tip my way

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INCOME is the amount of money a person makes from labor and investments

so if you work for 2,000 hours and are paid $40,000 in a year, that's income

OR if you have a $1,000,000 stock portfolio with a 5% return rate and cash out $40,000 of it, that's income too (fucked, right?)

WEALTH is the amount of capital you own

that could be owning a house and land worth $150,000

or owning a small business with $150,000 in assets

or owning $150,000 worth of stocks

wealth is the investments that are themselves accruing value

CLASS is about what you stand to inherit

in the united states we use a lot of weird doublespeak to avoid talking about the proletariat, the petit bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie directly

proletariat ~ working class
petit bourgeoisie ~ middle class
bourgeoisie ~ upper class

Why do we track institutional footprints? 🐘 (Thread)

Large institutions like mutual funds, hedge funds, banks, insurance companies, trusts, etc. amount for over 75% of all volume. These institutions move the market, not you and I.

It makes sense that if these guys are moving the markets, we would ideally want to buy the same stocks they are buying, but before they buy them? Right?

So, let’s get a clear understanding of how and why this is so important and what this might look like behind the scenes.

For starters, let’s discuss what we mean by a large institution. In this case, we are referring to the many funds, pensions, trusts, etc. that are responsible for managing tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars.

Hence, they easily attract and can afford to retain the planet’s top talent, not to mention, their research budgets are enormous.

They have access to information and resources that the retail crowd simply does not, and if they did, it would likely be extremely unaffordable.

Lots of requests for a "step-by-step" guide to where we are with the EU-UK negotiations.

So here you go - short thread summarising the essential context & key points / issues:

1) UK formally left EU in January 2020 but entered a "transition period" during which nothing very much changed: meant to give time for negotiations over future EU-UK relationship in fields like trade and security; based on "Political Declaration" as agreed by Johnson Government

2) Political Declaration envisaged only distant EU-UK relationship: partly logical consequence of Theresa May's longstanding "red lines" on free movement etc; but also result of renewed political preference, by Johnson Government, for even more extreme "clean break Brexit"

3) But almost immediately after UK withdrawal, Johnson Government changed the goalposts in ways that can only be described as cynical, untrustworthy and reckless. Started by tearing up large parts of Political Declaration: even its distant ties were no longer distant enough...

4) ... & continued with new red lines / fresh demands reflecting Johnson's (frankly tedious) belief that UK should "have its cake and eat it". So: back to square one - yet UK refused extension to transition period, to give more time for negotiations - even after onset of pandemic

has anyone covering the Wall Street GME reaping and sowing gone into the fact that a lot of the GameStop and directly associated trades have been largely amplified by social listening powered mega firms doing machine learning automated trades because the “idea” of GME is popular?

like I thought this was a thing investor people & press just knew & instead it’s all just focused on the message of redditors clowning short sellers and not “the computers saw the infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters and decided That Would Be A Cool Thing To Emulate” for $$$

for those new: finance social listening is a marketing “science” that involves advanced web & social network data collectors scraping everything for nuance on companies, purchasing behavior & language, investor & finance sentiment, etc & using it to make billions of trades for $$

Musk & his core investor clique is notorious for doing this as are some other big hedge firms & finance firms - you take the raw off Bloomberg Terminal, Superdata, public social networks and headlines etc etc, machine learning the fuck out of it, collect money. A hype machine.

This has been going on for about 8 years but only got popular & competitive in the past 2, when firms realized the machines could do a better job with these data flows in setting up short term shorts & holds vs people - & they could also “game” media to effect other hype machines