BusinessWeek on Amazon Web Services (2006)

Yes, Amazon founder and Chief Executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, the onetime Internet poster boy who quickly became a post-dot-com piñata, is back with yet another new idea.  Many people continue to wonder if the world's largest online store will ever fulfill its original promise to revolutionize retailing.  But now Bezos is plotting another new direction for his 12-year-old company, which he will lay out on Nov. 8 at San Francisco's Web 2.0 Conference, the annual gathering of the digerati crème.  Judging from an advance look he gave BusinessWeek on one recent gray day at Amazon's Seattle headquarters, it's so far from Amazon's retail core that you may well wonder if he has finally slipped off the deep end.

~ Robert D. Hof, "Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet," BusinessWeek, November 13, 2006

Nate Geraci on the speculative mania in "Reddit stocks"

The speculative mania in ‘Reddit stocks’ has simply overshadowed Ark Invest and pretty much everything else in the markets.  It’s a fascinating dichotomy right now with investors pumping money into companies of the past versus companies of the future. 

~ Nate Geraci, president of the ETF Store, "ARK Mania Finally Fading After GameStop Fever Sweeps Wall Street," WealthManagement.com, January 29, 2021

Jeff Deist on price discovery

The purpose of capital markets is price discovery.  They help investors and businesses allocate capital to its best and highest uses, however imperfectly and haphazardly.  Short traders, long traders, so-called insider traders, futures traders, derivative contracts, speculators, gamblers, colluders, and even naked short sellers all serve this imperfect process.

~ Jeff Deist, "The GameStop Saga Unravels Stakeholder Theory," Mises.org, February 3, 2021

Dwight D. Murphey on the multicultural threat to the West (1987)

So the future, as always, is problematical. The issue as framed for the future becomes one of whether Europe and America will continue to lead or even to exist as such. In part this is question of whether the majority within the West has become so effete and so immobilized by the existence of the alienated intellectual culture within it that it is prepared to see itself displaced and its influence seep away. From all appearances, the current American majority, which rarely asserts its own prerogatives in either ideology or politics, is willing to acquiesce in this transformation. 

Stated another way, the new struggle that today's "multiculturalism" poses will be about whether America and Europe are to dissolve into the Third World, or whether all of mankind will rise to a new level under the leadership of positive forces that will include, as one of their primary ingredients, the heritage of the West. There will be very little "heritage of the West" involved in it if the alienated intellectual culture - the driving force behind "liberalism in contemporary America" - has its way.

~ Dwight D. Murphey, Liberalism in Contemporary America (1987), p. 301

Steve Goldstein on the investment experience of GameStop and AMC speculators

And those traders are inexperienced. Cardify, a consumer-data firm, did a survey of 1,600 self-directed investors in GameStop and cinema chain AMC Entertainment, and found that most were inexperienced investors having less than 12 months of experience, and another quarter with one to two years’ experience. Nearly half made their biggest-ever do-it-yourself trading investment in the last four weeks, according to the survey that ended on Monday. 

Why? Of these overwhelmingly young and male investors, 45% said for quick financial profits. Nearly 20% said it was part of a long-term investing strategy, and 16% said to spite big hedge funds and institutional investors, according to Cardify.

~ Steve Goldstein, "GameStop’s meteoric gains have almost entirely disappeared — here’s advice for those who didn’t get out in time," MarketWatch, February 5, 2021

Kevin Duffy: Did the Fed force Main Street to play at the casino?

Q: Did the Fed with its monetary policy force Main Street to play at the casino? 

Duffy: While I understand the damage the Fed has done, no one is forcing these people into the casino. In fact, when Robinhood temporarily shut the casino doors on sure losers like GME and AMC last week, people like AOC, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, Jr. cried foul. 

No, these people are taking out their anger - at financial bailouts, at billionaires, at a "rigged system" - by turning themselves into compulsive gamblers.  Ok, they won a round of high stakes poker with an audacious and reckless bluff. It worked, congratulations.  Now what?  This will not end well.  It's tragic.  The last thing people should do is cheer them on based on their own distorted worldview.

~ Kevin Duffy, comment on Mises.org article, "The GameStop Rebels vs. 'Too Big to Fail'," Mises.org, February 2, 2021

Vlad Tenev on the GameStop short squeeze and clearinghouse deposit requirements

Last week, we witnessed something the stock market has never quite experienced before.  Short squeezes on a small number of stocks triggered wild gyrations in prices, massive volatility that prompted clearinghouses to take swift action to protect the plumbing that handles stock trading every day. 

In a matter of days, our clearinghouse-mandated deposit requirements related to stocks increased ten-fold.  These deposits are the collateral we post to ensure our access to clearinghouse services on behalf of our customers.  They are what led us to put temporary buying restrictions in place on a small number of securities that the clearinghouses had raised their deposit requirements on.  As we noted in a blog on Friday, it was not because we wanted to stop people from buying these or any stocks — we built Robinhood to provide access to investing for all.  And it certainly wasn’t because we were trying to help hedge funds.

~ Vlad Tenev, "Robinhood CEO: We're helping those left behind by Wall Street, not hedge funds," USA Today, January 31, 2021