What we’re reading (7/9)
“Palantir, One of Silicon Valley’s Oldest Startups, Files to Go Public” (Wall Street Journal). For half a decade, the data analytics company co-founded by Peter Thiel and credited with helping the U.S. kill Osama bin Laden has “teased the market” with potential stock offering. Now, the company has announced it has submitted draft registration papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission to do just that.
“Understanding the Pandemic Stock Market” (Project Syndicate). A thoughtful article by Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller. Per Shiller: “stock-market movements are driven largely by investors’ assessments of other investors’ evolving reaction to the news, rather than the news itself. That is because most people have no way to evaluate the significance of economic or scientific news. Especially when mistrust of news media is high, they tend to rely on how people they know respond to news. This process of evaluation takes time, which is why stock markets do not respond to news suddenly and completely, as conventional theory would suggest. The news starts a new trend in markets, but it is sufficiently ambiguous that most smart money has difficulty profiting from it.”
“Wirecard May Have Laundered Money In Addition To Making It Up” (Dealbreaker). Besides the saga of the $2 billion that doesn’t exist, which has now been widely discussed in the media, apparently some of the non-made-up money passing through Wirecard may have been laundered. Sounds like the FBI is in on the action, which (allegedly!) involves a German national living in Florida operating an unlicensed money-transferring business serving illicit online gambling profiteers.
“Once You’re Out of the Market, It’s Tricky Getting Back In” (New York Times). Time in the market beats timing the market, as they say: “…instead of abruptly abandoning stocks when they decline, shrewd investors will view market drops as an opportunity to buy — and have the financial wherewithal to withstand short-term losses. But many people act against their own interests[.]” It’s all fake losses until you sell, right?!
“Producer Price Index: What To Know In Markets Friday” (Yahoo! Finance). U.S. producer prices (a measure of prices based on prices received by producers for their products rather than the prices paid by consumers, like the CPI) fell off a cliff at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, but they’ve been coming back.
