What we’re reading (8/26)

• “I’m Billy Graham’s Granddaughter. Evangelical Support For Donald Trump Spits On His Legacy” (USA Today). According to the granddaughter of Billy Graham, American evangelicals have no business supporting Trump, and the community’s leaders have led the flock astray by going full #MAGA.

• “Palantir Files To Go Public, Lost About $580 Million Last Year” (CNBC). The data analytics company founded by Peter Thiel “has released its prospectus to debut on public markets. The company aims to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol PLTR. Rather than sell shares through an initial public offering, the company intends to debut with a direct listing, the same unconventional route taken by Slack in 2019 and Spotify in 2018.”

• “Vanguard Scales Back In Asia” (Wall Street Journal). Vanguard (the index fund company founded by Jack Bogle) is closing down operations in Hong Kong and Japan and focusing its Asia operations on Mainland China.

• “Insiders Are Now Unloading Stocks—Here’s Why You Shouldn’t See This As A Sell Signal” (MarketWatch). It turns out the “insiders” that are selling are not really insiders, just large shareholders (so large that they have to report their buying/selling to the SEC). When you strip them out of the data, true insiders—e.g., corporate executives that you might expect to have better information about their stock than you—were net buyers in the first half of August.

• “The Best Way To Play The Vaccine Races? Don’t.” (Fisher Investments). I tend to agree. “Markets are efficient and forward-looking, quickly digesting widely known information and then moving on. Given the amount of attention on vaccine candidates and clinical trials, basing investment decisions on vaccine news is the very definition of buying on widely known information. Presuming it offers any sort of an edge is to presume markets aren’t efficient at all, with a blind spot toward one of the most discussed news items on Earth. That strikes us as heat chasing and a recipe for error.”