Possibly the greatest NBER abstract ever written.

After a couple years of ads telling men to do laundry turned out, weirdly, to not boost fertility, Korea is back to financial incentives, which prior research has shown do work but at a very high price.

Korea is adding a $275/month allowance for the first year of a baby's life, increasing the pregnancy medical benefit by $400 or so, and providing an $1800 baby bonus. There's also some unspecified benefits related to leave and high-parity families.

The thing to understand is that these efforts are not *actually* huge. Quoting things in won gives you big numbers so it's easy to lose sight of the fact that we're not talking about enough money to actually offset a large share of wages.

I'm a fan of baby bonuses and first-year benefits. They're probably the most bang for the buck.

But this isn't actually all that many bucks!

These benefits add up to about $5,500 in benefits. A similar program compared to average incomes in the US would be about $8,700.

Conservatives love to complain about the media.

But there's an inside baseball media that reveals how destructive the conservative media criticism environment can be to the conservative movement.

Enter, Fox News:

The story is pretty simple.

On election night, Fox News called Arizona very early. This surprised pretty much everyone. The Fox News team had improved their election model in 2020, and was confident their call was correct, even if unconventional.

Controversially, however, they called it for Joe Biden. Arizona has historically been a red state, and the polls (and final result) were close there. Nobody had a really strong expectation it was gonna go for Biden until Fox News just.... called it.

This hurled Trump surrogates into a desperate place. If they lost *Arizona*, that was a bad sign for the night. More importantly, it happened before midnight: it humiliated the President while millions were still watching.

The Trump campaign immediately turned on a dime. They pivoted from "Look, we're crushing it with Hispanics! Massive turnout! Incredible performance!" to "The election was stolen."

Who stole the election changed over time. Fox News. Some rando in Atlanta. Poll workers. China.

the strange reality of strict calvinism is that it makes a mockery of God's claims to hate, abhort, or even be theoretically opposed to evil

the calvinist solution to the problem of evil, which I have *literally heard from the lips of a faithful well-catechized Presbyterian* is, "well, all that happens is God's will, and to do His will is to manifest goodness, and goodness gives God joy, so God must rejoice in evil"

The hypothetical I gave was, "Suppose that there was a city of Christians, and a bomber flew over the city, and the guy at the controls tripped and accidentally armed and dropped a bomb, and wiped out the city: is that God's will? What does God think of that?"

His answer in addition to the above cited the Flood, Soddom, and Nineveh.

Because we all know that God's response to the Flood was, "I REALLY liked that, it was AWESOME, it satisfied my will and purposes to obliterate my creation!"

Once you have drunk the "but muh sovrintee" Kool-Aid you cannot escape the argument that literally everything that happens is not just God's will in some philosophical sense, but His will in the sense of "things that bring him pleasure."

A THREAD:

BEST OPTIONS STRATEGY FOR CONSISTENT INCOME -

OPTIONS WHEEL STRATEGY

Everything to know about this strategy I'm posting in this thread.

(1/12)

Step 1: Stock Selection

1. For this strategy you're going to have to choose some stocks that you think will be doing well in the future/long term.

2. Stock must be in an uptrend.

3. Stock options should be liquid enough to trade in.

4. List of stocks attached

(2/12)

Step 2: Which option to sell?

1. Sell put at a support according to charts.

2. Sell put at a strike far away from the spot where you think the probability of the stock falling will be very very low.

3. Sell put at a price where you're willing to buy the stock at.

(3/12)

Step 3: What to do when in profit/loss?

1. If in profit you can just roll up the puts thereby increasing the ROI or shift to other stocks to make more profit.

2. If in loss take delivery of the shares equivalent to the lot size in cash market.

(4/12)

Step 4: What to do after taking the delivery?

1. Sell calls to lower your cost price of the stock. For eg, you took delivery of Reliance at 1900, sell 2100 CE which is about 10% away.

2. Keep doing this till your CE expires ITM and then give delivery of your stock away

(5/12)

As a former professional poker player, I'm very clear about the importance of psychology in investing/trading.

You can have a very solid strategy, but if the mental aspect fails, everything fails, no matter how good you are.

Thread 👇

In this thread I will briefly describe the most important aspects of trading psychology, and give some simple tips to try to improve them.

It's good to always be aware of these aspects, to be able to detect them and act in time.

1) FEAR

This is one of the most important. It can make you get out of a position at the wrong time.

One of the main reasons you can have fear is because you are putting more at risk than you are willing to lose.

Tip: reduce the size of your position until you are comfortable.

2) GREED

Greed can be even worse than fear. It leads you to be overpositioned and to destroy your average entry.

Tip: learn to conform to what you have. Practice gratitude for everything that comes your way. Remember that the most important thing is to stay in the game.

3) TILT

This is well known in poker. There are many reasons why tilt can appear (downswings, injustice, mistakes...)

Tilt takes you away from your perfect strategy. From your A game.

After a losing streak you may think that the market is being unfair to you.

1/x Vanna is back & ready to turn back on the charm! Overnight the market hit our weeklong target of **3705 and pulled back... We were able to take profits & play for a bit of morning digestion. It’s been a nice +3.5% in a week w/a few extra scalps along the way...But the best

2/x part has been the gift of Vol compression, which along w/ short Vol profits, has given us significant calendar expansion & dispersion opps, as predicted. I expect this to continue this week as well, as Ivol oversupply should continue to be the dominant force until 12/11.This,

3/x paired w/ the significantly increasing Vanna & Charm flows, will make it hard for any decline until 12/14 to catch meaningful momentum. This said, the narrowing of 20 day RVol as well as the 2 stddev of the 20 day just overhead should cap any rallies, given the dramatically

4/x overextended retail (8-day SMA of P/C equity is the lowest in 20 years) & institutional positioning. This push/pull, should ultimately keep the market fairly pinned this week...Jan 8th call’s on back are incredibly cheap w/ a GA runoff event straddle of only $55, which given

5/x the potential macro-cyclical consequences of the next 2 years of fiscal stimulus seems absurd...& In terms of a more short term trade,Tesla Vol is either too high or 12/18 on back calendar spreads in the SPX are too low, as there’s no premium being priced in for the inclusion

A small thread on momentum investing and how I practice it.

I use the Nifty 500 universe for selecting my momentum stocks. Nifty 500, as the name suggests, has 500 companies in it. WRONG !!!! It actually has 501 companies. Yes, I double-checked 🙂 So, these 501 companies is

my talent pool (if you will) from which I select the 50 best candidates that I want to bet my money on.

Ok. So, exactly, did I go about doing that.

Step 1: Start with Nifty 500 universe (501 companies)

Step 2: Eliminate all those companies which have a listing history of

less than 1 year. This eliminated 25 companies (see table).

Step 3: For the remaining 476 companies, I computed their last 12-month rolling price returns (meaning, comparison of their price as on March 31, 2022 as compared to that as on March 31, 2021, and then computing the %

gain that each of those stocks have earned. I found out the following:

a) Average return of all the 476 companies was 43.27% (meaning if their average price as on March 31, 2021 was 100, then their average price as on March 31, 2022 was 143.27)

b) Out of these 476 companies

140 companies, gave a negative return.

c) Out of the balance 336 companies, 46 companies gave single-digit returns

d) Out of the balance 290 companies, 101 companies gave a return between 10-30%

e) Out of the balance 189 companies, 55 gave returns between 30-50%