What we’re reading (2/6)
“More Bubbles, Less shorting. What The GameStop Craziness Could Mean For The Future Of Investing” (CNBC). “‘What is new is the scale and speed of the event,’ said Veljko Fotak, associate professor of finance at the University at Buffalo. The ubiquity of smartphones on which people can download investing apps, the availability of cheap or free trading and ‘a pandemic with a lot of restless energy,’ are all factors that contributed to the video game retailer’s rally, said Dan Egan, vice president of finance and investing at Betterment.”
“A New Epoch For Retail Investors Is Just Beginning” (The Economist). “Look beyond the memes and the mania, though, and the [GameStop] story tells you something about the deep structural changes in financial markets. The fact that the fast-paced frenzy was possible is a testament to just how frictionless trading stocks has become, aided by technological advances. Shares can be bought on an app while you queue for a coffee, at a price that is whisker-close to the wholesale price.”
“Citadel Securities, Accused Of Rigging Markets, Accuses Someone Else Of Rigging Markets” (DealBreaker). “Its preemptive protestations of guileless innocence notwithstanding, the Citadel family of companies has attracted precisely the sort of attention in l’affaire GameStop it had hoped to thusly avoid: from angry Redditors and their lawyers; from unfriendly leaders in Congress; from unscrupulous attorneys general who know a thing about securities fraud themselves.”
“Global Central Bank Interventions Raise Specter Of ‘Currency War’” (MarketWatch). “Are central banks on the verge of a currency war with the U.S? That’s the question on the minds of some investors and economists as the U.S. dollar’s decline in the year has forced central banks across the world to intervene in their own currencies at the risk of attracting the scrutiny of the new Biden administration which is eager to support U.S. factories and create manufacturing jobs.”
“Elon Musk’s Dogecoin Tweeting Has Believers Barking For More” (Wall Street Journal). “The reckless abandon of the investing world has a new fixation: a cryptocurrency that began in 2013 as a joke, was mostly forgotten, and thanks to a flurry of tweets from Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk, is suddenly worth a total of more than $6 billion.”
