What we’re reading (7/14)
“Financial Stocks Rise Ahead Of Busy Week For Earnings, Inflation Data” (Wall Street Journal). “U.S. financial stocks inched higher Monday, raising expectations that banks’ quarterly earnings and a key measure on consumer prices will signal that economic conditions remain strong. Wells Fargo shares climbed 1.1%, JPMorgan Chase rose 0.6% and BlackRock increased 0.9%. All three financial firms are among those due to report second-quarter results on Tuesday, when investors will also receive a June reading on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’s monthly consumer-price index.”
“Private Equity Now Owns More Than 40 Minor League Baseball Teams, And The Number Keeps Growing” (Defector). “Diamond Baseball Holdings, a company backed by the private equity firm Silver Lake, has acquired 45 Minor League Baseball teams since its creation in late 2021. They own teams from coast to coast, in cities big and small. This means one company now owns more than 35 percent of all MiLB teams. And it shows no sign of slowing down.”
“Little Videos Are Cooking Our Brains” (Vox). “We’ve known for a while thatthe rise of AI would flood the internet with slop. Slop is already remarkably popular on YouTube, where nearly half ofthe 10 most popular channels contain AI-generated content. There are even virtual personalities powered by AI earning millions on YouTube. These platforms know that making content easier to produce will lead to more content, which leads to more engagement, which leads to more ads, which ultimately leads to a less enriching, more addictive internet. That’s why YouTube is pushing Veo 3 to its creators, and why, as oflast month, TikTok and Open AI have pushed out similar tools. This wouldn’t be such a concern if you wanted to seek out awful AI-generated videos. Instead, the slop finds you unwittingly and drowns you in anxiety.”
“Vanguard Goes Big On Crypto, Thanks To The Index-Fund Boom It Unleashed” (Bloomberg). “Vanguard Group Inc. executives, channeling the logic of the venerable Jack Bogle, have made their opinions on crypto clear. Yet thanks to the cold logic of index investing, the $10 trillion money-management giant is now the biggest backer of Strategy, the software firm that famously reinvented itself as a proxy for Bitcoin and became a poster child for the industry’s ambitions. Vanguard owns more than 20 million shares, nearly 8%, of all of Strategy’s (MSTR) outstanding Class A common stock, and likely surpassed Capital Group Cos. for the no. 1 spot sometime in the fourth quarter, according to data compiled by Bloomberg based on regulatory filings. The dozens of Vanguard mutual funds and ETFs that hold the stakes track everything from small- and mid-cap benchmarks to momentum, value and growth gauges, among others.”
“Pulte’s Social Media Posts Become Must-Follow For Stock Traders” (Bloomberg). “[T]raders are being forced to pay attention to an unlikely official: Federal Housing Finance Agency head Bill Pulte. Stocks have swung wildly on Pulte’s comments as he opines on everything from credit score pricing, to cryptocurrencies as mortgage assets, and even the job security of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Sometimes preceded by cryptic teasers, his online comments have fueled the worst one-day drop in half a decade for credit-score provider Fair Isaac Corp. (FICO), multiple slumps in credit bureau stocks and even a brief drip in the entire S&P 500 Index on Friday. His market moving ability has ‘thrust a normally obscure government official into the forefront of business news,’ said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers.”
