1. Lots of talk about Miami's innovation economy. Here's a little analysis we did several years back. Lots more of this at our old site for the Miami Urban Future

1/x The market continues to try & shake out weak hands from overextended positioning by both HF & Retail...After a strong Vanna run up overnight, as expected, retail exuberance exploded on the open in the form of retail call buying, this fragility, paired w/a)Mean reverting flows

2/x from pinned Index Vol b) well documented, risk parity rebalancing flows & c) selling flows tied to bank EOY liquidity constraints. In combination, these flows have together have amounted to substantive selling pressures, strong enough to counteract the positive vanna/ charm

3/x flows, & point to continued likely index RVol an IVol pinning...Historically, the week of quarterly OpEx markets are notoriously volatile intraday, but also mean reverting like we saw today. I think it is fair to expect continued IVol compression & more of the same underlying

4/x chop. Vanna/Charm flows will lose their oomph after Wed 12/16 vixperation morning. There’s a window of weakness which I’ve spoken to for a month that falls 12/16-12/23. That could open a brief window that could lead to revaluation of the real risk & short interest,post 1/6...

5/x but the overwhelming 10k 🦍 of index Vol compression should still hold any correction in time & price in check in the shortterm and it’ll be hard to have anything blow up too bad in SPX land given how cheap & abundant Xmas Vol is 12/23-12/24. NTM, a stim deal & potential Fed

Ben Graham managed to compound money at 20%/year for 20 years at his partnership following a value investing strategy

In 1948 he acquired 50% stake in GEICO. It had to be distributed to his investors

They almost didn't make the investment due to some accounting questions 1/

Ben Graham paid $712,500 for 50% of GEICO in 1948. He put 25% of his investment assets in GEICO.

This investment did so well that the price of its shares advanced to two hundred times or more than the price of the half-interest by 1971/1972 2/

Ironically, the aggregate of profits accruing from this single investment decision far exceeded the sum of all the others realized through 20 years of operations in the partners specialized fields, involving much investigation, endless pondering&countless individual decisions 3/

Are there morals to this story of value to the intelligent investor?

An obvious one is that there are several different ways to make and keep money on Wall Street 4/

Another, not so obvious, is that one lucky break, or one supremely shrewd decision may count for more than a lifetime of journeyman efforts.

But behind the luck, or the crucial decision, there must usually exist a background of preparation and disciplines capacity. 5/

** MMT is the new supply-side economics
Forty years ago, some economists started from an uncontroversial (but important) result: a lower tax rate raises the tax base, so revenues won't fall as much. But then they ran with it, predicting tax rate cuts could raise revenues.

1/13

The 80s supply-siders went to the limit and came up with a motto: lower taxes will lower deficits as a norm, not an exception. Many economists shouted this was backwards. It was an implausible limit case. Textbooks called them "charlatans and cranks" or "silly".
2/13

In 80s debates, supply-siders would often fall back to "you don't understand me", repeating "Laffer curve!" endlessly, or stating vacuous accounting identities about how the government collect taxes. Their extreme prediction was repeatedly proven wrong by theory and data.
3/13

But they had popular hero figures (Laffer, Moore), and an eager political audience that would use any argument to cut taxes. Eventually, they inspired new good research, and helped in swinging the pendulum of policy debates to include some valid supply considerations.
4/13

Yet, supply-side economic ideas also contributed to a massive rise in US public debt in the last 40 years. Right-wing governments became as prone to have large public deficits as left-wing governments, in the pursuit of cuts in taxes.
5/13