China’s Real Goal in Tech Crackdown: A Regimented, Obedient Society

August 31, 2021 tremendousblog 1 Comment

China’s government has just launched the latest salvo against its own technology industry:

China on Monday issued strict new measures aimed at curbing what authorities describe as youth videogame addiction, which they blame for a host of societal ills, including distracting young people from school and family responsibilities.
The new regulation, unveiled by the National Press and Publication Administration, will ban minors, defined as those under 18 years of age, from playing online videogames entirely between Monday and Thursday. On the other three days of the week, and on public holidays, they will be only permitted to play between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.

This is likely to have a substantial effect on major Chinese tech companies like Tencent and NetEase, leaders in videogames. The new regulation is the latest development in a crackdown on companies in ride sharing, food delivery, educational tech, and more.

I see two major issues with this crackdown:

Economy

If you can have your business regulated out of existence at any time, you might not start one. And if you do, it will be a lot harder to attract investors.

Tech companies rely on venture capital to grow. That funding is already beginning to dry up. No wonder the number of Chinese companies reaching $1 billion valuation (“unicorns”) is falling off a cliff:

I invest in American startups regularly. There is zero possibility I’d invest in a Chinese one. The odds of the government one day deciding your industry is bad for “social stability” are just too high.

Without capital, Chinese tech companies will wither.

Society

Imagine the U.S. government telling you, “Sorry Timmy, you can only play video games from 8 to 9pm on weekends. Oh, 7 is better for you? Well too bad.”

In the context of a free society, this is unthinkable. In China, the government is taking on the role of a parent. It’s another step to totalitarianism, where the government controls all aspects of life.

And China’s crackdown goes way beyond tech:

Zhao Wei, one of China’s most prominent actresses, saw her presence mostly scrubbed from the country’s internet overnight. Her fan page on Weibo, China’s heavily censored version of Twitter, was shut down. Movies and television shows she starred in — some going as far back as two decades ago — were taken off streaming platforms, with her name also removed from the cast lists.
On Chinese social media, some comments said the crackdown was reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political and social turmoil between 1966 and 1976 during which arts and culture were restricted to promoting party propaganda.
It was not immediately clear why Zhao was targeted.

The message from Xi Jinping is clear: he wants the people quiet and obedient. Anyone who stands out for any reason, be it an actress or a tech tycoon like Jack Ma, will be dealt with.

If you’re in China now, I urge you to emigrate. This will not end well.

Robot Hands, Vertical Farms, and the Future of Food

August 30, 2021 tremendousblog 3 Comments

On Saturday, I stood in the produce section of a nearby Whole Foods. My eyes were drawn to tiny packages of delicate microgreens. The producer: Aero Farms.

Agriculture faces a difficult environment. Climate change is making weather more extreme and unpredictable. Workers are harder and harder to find. But a new model of farming is emerging, and it looks like nothing else we’ve ever seen.

Aero Farms grows greens in vertical stacks in what was once an abandoned steel mill. The farm is in gritty Newark, NJ, just a few miles from the Whole Foods where I encountered their product. They use 95% less water and 99% less land than a traditional farm. And unlike other farms, they can grow year round.

Technology is also revolutionizing how produce is picked. A company called Root AI makes soft, robotic hands that can pick anything from a hearty cucumber to a fragile strawberry. Alongside the robotic hands is a camera enabled with AI, which can identify the ripe produce and leave the rest to grow.

Seeing it in action feels like seeing the future:

These robots are now being put to use in giant warehouse farms that you could easily mistake for an Amazon Fulfillment Center. These are a project of AppHarvest, which claims they use 90% less water and are 30 times more productive per acre than a traditional farm.

Is that an Amazon Fulfillment Center in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Even if the company’s projections are a bit optimistic, there’s strong evidence from numerous producers that indoor farming uses dramatically less water and space. And with the farm just a few miles from its customers in major cities, transportation costs and emissions are cut to the bone.

Putting robotics and indoor farming together, I think we are headed to a future that produces more output (food) with far fewer inputs (labor, water, land). And unlike human labor, electronics tend to rapidly decrease in price. That will only speed their adoption and lower food prices further.

To quote Lincoln Steffens:

“I have seen the future and it works.”

Move Over, Cake Boss: There’s a New Sheriff in Town

August 27, 2021 tremendousblog 1 Comment

Buddy Valastro of Carlo’s Bakery may be the Cake Boss, but there’s a new sheriff in town.

Recoleta is an Argentinian bakery in Union City, NJ that makes some of the best cake I’ve ever tasted. When I walked in for the first time in 2019, I noticed 3 things:

1) The beautiful interior, filled with comfortable couches and chairs

2) The engrossing pastry case, replete with the traditional pastries of Argentina

3) The prices, which are from another era. Most pastries are little more than a dollar, and slices of cake are around $3.

As you bite into a slice of their chocolate cake, you glide through a thick layer of velvety buttercream into moist spongecake pervaded by cocoa.

With a satisfying cup of coffee at your side, and a mere $4 and change gone from your wallet, you can gaze out at lively Bergenline Avenue and watch the people go by.

I can’t think of a better way to pass an afternoon.

If you’re in the area, stop by Recoleta…before TLC does. 🙂

Have a great weekend everyone!

For Retail Traders, AMC Has Become the Only Meme Stock

August 26, 2021 tremendousblog Leave a comment

As meme stocks rocketed upward this week, one stock captured virtually all retail buyers. Retail traders funneling money into meme stocks put 93% of it into shares of AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc.:

Stocks preferred by day traders soared 10% Tuesday, the most since early June as trading volumes accelerated. Long-short hedge funds that are quick to dump bearish bets were likely among drivers for Tuesday’s strength in stocks that have high levels of short interest, Vanda said in a report.

“Despite the broad rally in meme stocks, retail purchases were mainly concentrated on AMC, with over $56 million in Tuesday’s session,” Vanda’s Ben Onatibia and Giacomo Pierantoni wrote in a note. “All other meme stocks combined, totaled a paltry $4 million in net retail buying.”

AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. surged 20% Tuesday to the highest since July 9.

For more than 90% of retail money in a category to go to a single stock, even for a brief period, is nothing short of extraordinary.

Hedge funds have begun to join the Reddit crowd, piling into heavily shorted meme stocks. They’re also carefully monitoring social media sites for the next hot play:

…a Goldman Sachs basket of the most-shorted U.S. shares has surged like never before to outperform the broader market by 31 percentage points this year. Retail buying of names most-shorted by hedge funds in 2021 like AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and GameStop is upending the once-popular quant trade.
In a survey with 100 hedge-fund managers overseeing US$231 billion conducted by SIGTech, nearly three-quarters said they’ve increased use of data from social media and chat rooms over the past year.

I’d be willing to bet some are doing a lot more than monitoring. They’re probably posting content of their own. And with the massive budgets of hedge funds, they can hire armies of coders to make their message omnipresent.

An interesting new era is dawning in the hottest stocks in the market. The financial establishment is co-opting the hordes of small traders trying to take them down.

Buckets of institutional money could move meme stocks like never before.

Short Sellers Lost $1 Billion Yesterday in AMC and GameStop

August 25, 2021 tremendousblog Leave a comment

Short sellers have been fighting retail traders all year. Yesterday, they took a major hit:

“Heavily shorted stocks have, for the last month, been less volatile than earlier this year. Today we saw an end to this,” said Ortex co-founder Peter Hillerberg.
The share price gains in AMC and GameStop generated losses for close to $1 billion for short sellers, Hillerberg said.

AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. was the most active stock in the entire options market. This is remarkable for a company whose market cap is only $23 billion. Apple, the biggest stock in the market, is over 100 times as large.

The options activity in both AMC and GameStop Corp. was strongly bullish, with call options (the right to purchase shares in the future) going like hotcakes.

No obvious news propelled these stocks upward. Yet hedge funds maintain their risky short positions.

This means using investors’ money to bet against stocks that gyrate wildly at the whims of retail traders. I find that to be irresponsible.

But, to quote one of my favorite movies:

Well, it could’ve been worse, right? Could’ve been my money.
Marv, Wall Street

Charting The Huge Drop in AMC Fails to Deliver

August 24, 2021 tremendousblog Leave a comment

There appears to be some fishy activity going on in shares of AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. The stock has long had huge “fails to deliver,” or trades that aren’t completed.

This can be a sign of illegal naked short selling, which is selling shares short without borrowing them first. Naked short selling is a sophisticated and powerful tactic that can drive share prices down, fast.

Last week, we talked about the huge drop in fails to deliver that occurred in the most recent SEC data, from the second half of July. Today, I decided to chart all AMC’s fails to deliver for July (above.)

As you can see, the number was staggering at the beginning of the month. As of July 1st, little AMC had fails to deliver 35,000 times as large as Amazon, one of the biggest companies on earth.

Exchanges whittled that number down substantially over the course of the month. (Note that the figure is cumulative, rather than just reflecting fails to deliver that occurred that day.)

Perhaps moves by the SEC, New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC), and others to clean up the failed trades had an effect.

AMC still has massive fails to deliver for a stock its size. It ended the month with 160,233 fails to deliver, still 239 times the end-of-month figure for Amazon and 351 times Apple’s.

Regulators have made progress, but there’s a lot further to go.

Paul Castellano’s Last Day

August 23, 2021 tremendousblog Leave a comment

Salvatore Gravano, a made member of the Gambino crime family, walked into a room with a heart shaped bed. The sheets were red velvet. Mirrors lined the ceiling.

This was no romantic getaway. Gravano had just murdered the most powerful mob boss in the country. Now he was on the run.

In an engrossing episode of the Our Thing podcast, Sammy the Bull describes the murder of Paul Castellano and its aftermath.

The love nest Sammy found himself in belonged to Joe Watts, a fellow soldier. Sammy and his crew hid there after the hit, bracing for the war they were sure was coming.

Gravano, exhausted, took the couch instead. His fatigue after the hit is a strange parallel to Irish mobster Whitey Bulger, who often slept after his many murders.

This is the biggest hit of all time.
Frankie DeCicco

The war never came. The Castellano hit had been conducted brazenly amid the crowds in Midtown Manhattan. Anyone who had a problem with Gotti and Gravano kept their mouths shut, afraid to meet to same fate.

John Gotti was made boss of the Gambino family in the basement of a school. A fellow mobster had a connection there.

I picture the children who came the next day, never knowing what happened.

NJ’s Best Apple Cider Donut

August 20, 2021 tremendousblog 1 Comment

On Wednesday, my wife’s coworker gave us the most meaningful of gifts: two apple cider donuts. Considerate husband that I am, I ate them both.

They were the best I’ve ever tasted.

Francesca’s Bakery, with locations in Clifton and Pequannock, makes donuts, danishes, babka and much more! They even appear at numerous farmer’s markets in New York City, including one near the United Nations where my wife first encountered their delicious baked goods.

The apple cider donut is generously sugared, airy, and rich. Biting into it evokes a candied cloud.

Get several. One won’t be enough.

Francesca’s was started in 2009 and gets its ingredients from nearby farms. Everything is fresh, and it shows.

If you’re in the area, check it out! And if you’re not, you can even order their rugelach by mail!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Jim Simons Buys AMC, Bets on Retail Trend

August 19, 2021 tremendousblog Leave a comment

James Simons of Renaissance Technologies LLC is one of the greatest hedge fund managers in history. His fund’s annualized returns are an eye-popping 66% a year since 1988. Lately, he’s been loading up on shares in meme stock AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc:

Renaissance Technologies, which held approximately 516,000 AMC shares by March this year, has more than tripled its stake in the firm. Cumulatively, RenTech now owns more than 1.8 million shares.

Despite the entrance of some hedge funds, about 80% of AMC’s stock is held by retail investors.

Simons seems acutely aware that individual traders are flooding the stock market and AMC shares in particular. Indeed, the number of retail brokerage accounts has exploded this year. From The Economist:

In 2019 around 59m Americans had accounts with one of seven of the largest brokers. This number has surged since to 95m, as 17m new accounts were opened in 2020 and 20m were set up this year.

Short squeeze or no, that’s a powerful source of demand that Simons and Renaissance can benefit from.

I don’t know whether the stock will go up, down, or in circles. But I do know that I wouldn’t want to bet against Jim Simons.

Hedge Funds Hit Hard by Meme Stock Losses, Badly Behind S&P 500

August 18, 2021 tremendousblog Leave a comment

Losses betting against meme stocks have hit hedge funds hard this year. The latest data from Barclay Hedge shows year-to-date gains for equity long/short funds of 8.51%. (This is the type of fund that would typically take short positions in stocks.)

Meanwhile, the S&P 500 has returned 18%.

One of the largest sources of losses for hedge funds this year is short positions in AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. Its shares are up more than 18 fold this year, inflicting billions in losses on short sellers. Other meme stocks like GameStop Corp. have also produced large losses.

This continues a pattern of long term underperformance for this strategy:

Investors are losing patience and rapidly withdrawing their money.

If you’re an investor in a fund with a losing strategy, a weak track record, and a habit of betting against the hottest stocks in the market, I ask you: why not try an index fund?

Tremendous

Monthly Archives: August 2021