Thriving with Interest!

What happened to get ETH a major leg up over the past 48 hours? Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EP) went live. What this means is that this  new fork will help the network become more efficient in terms of gas fees and, probably most importantly, it is starting to burn those fees (basically sending them to ETH addresses that are not accessible by anyone - which will reduce supply). What are the effects? Bitcoin has always had the edge in that people it has the 21 million cap. Ethereum didn't. With this new fork, Ethereum will possibly similarly be capped (or at a minimum it won't grow as much). The network is now burning new ether. As of 6pm Pacific Coast Time on 6 August, 7,300 ETH have been burned: you can monitor it here  https://ultrasound.money/ The price of ETH has risen close to $1,200 in the last 3 days from a low of close to $1700 to close to $2,900 on Friday evening. From a technical perspective this has led to a breakout which now means that it is likely to reach $3...

A recent headline from the WSJ: Let's be clear here, we needed to do a lot to shore up the economy during the pandemic caused recession of 2020. Virtually any job loss was not of one's own doing, but rather to this crisis. Therefore printing and handing out trillions of dollars was necessary.  This has worked miracles in terms of getting the economy back on track. Despite a slightly less than expected Q2 GDP numbers, we have had the fastest rebound ever and are back to pre pandemic levels and trajectory: We also have an economy with more job openings than applicants, real estate/stocks/other investment markets at or near all time highs.  Savings rates are sky high too.    Yet the Biden administration is looking to extend the eviction moratorium. This should not be a go to move. There comes a point where too much debt and printing of free money will not do anyone any good.  Firstly, $47 billion have already been allocated to help renters/landlords. Unfortunately ...

It sometimes doesn't matter how long one has spent looking at the stock market, there are some obvious things that can happen that are not spotted by even veteran investors... Firstly, for those of you that have missed it, Robinhood shares started trading last week at a price of $38. For the first few days, the IPO was a bust... Here we are a week later and the price has doubled in that time. For those that are fans of graphs: The cause of the bounce this week? WallStreetBets talking up the stock Options trading began on HOOD Overhang from "weak" hands had been taken out in the first few days of trading. So where does that leave us now? A stock that is worth almost as much as ICE, the owner of the NY Stock Exchange A stock that doubled in the space of 2 trading sessions and up 85% from it's IPO price The second most actively traded share on the US markets and most active stock on the retail platforms operated by the big brokerage firms. What to do now. Well from a med...

I read an excellent blog called 1729 from Balaji Srinivasan. I would strongly suggest that you do the same. Check out 1729.com . As an aside, many of you might be wondering what is special about 1729? No, it doesn't refer to some historical event that happened that year. Rather,  1729, the Hardy-Ramanujan Number, is the smallest number which can be expressed as the sum of two different cubes in two different ways.  1729 is the sum of the cubes of 10 and 9 - cube of 10 is 1000 and cube of 9 is 729; adding the two numbers results in 1729.  1729 is also the sum of the cubes of 12 and 1- cube of 12 is 1728 and cube of 1 is 1; adding the two results in 1729. Ok, enough of the math lesson, back to today's topic, remittances and how they are revolutionizing the uptake in crypto. Today, there was a great blogpost on 1729 and it was entitled: Here is the actual link to the story: https://1729.com/crypto-remittances The key takeaways are as follows: Every day, millions of foreign w...

Here is a headline from today's WSJ: For those of us that have worked in the investment banking industry, the name Goldman Sachs often conjures up very strong feeling, both positive and negative. Haters will hate, but what is clear is that they are a gold standard of investment banking and that anyone who has the opportunity to work there (Goldman's interview process is notoriously time consuming and difficult), should hop on it for the simple reason that you will eventually be able to parlay that into something great a few years down the road if/when the time is right to make a move.  On the one hand, this is not a surprise. Goldman announced Q2 profits of $5.49 billion (on revenues of $15.39 billion - this is a good gig if you can get it). This is coupled with very positive outlook statements given the visibility of deal flow, backlogs. Note that trading revenues are more volatile and less predictable. For this reason, raising salaries is not an issue for investment banks. On...