Tremendous

An angel investor's take on life and business

  • How Solana Could Wipe Out Visa and MasterCard

    Solana is all the rage in cryptocurrency markets these days. Its price is doing this:

    Looking at that chart, it would be easy to think that this new cryptocurrency is all hype and speculation. But I spent the afternoon digging into its capabilities as a platform, and they are incredible:

    Let’s assume you’re a merchant with $1 million in transactions to process. You can do it on Solana for virtually nothing. Or you can do it a little more slowly with Visa or MasterCard for $15,000 to $25,000. Which do you prefer?

    Granted, most merchants won’t have the slightest clue how to use Solana. But it’s not hard to imagine a new startup doing what Square or Stripe did: quickly going from unknown to ubiquitous processors of payments.

    If a new company handled your transaction using a stablecoin like USDC on the Solana platform, it could offer incredible speed and dramatically lower fees than the incumbents, while still keeping a nice margin for itself.

    Visa’s market cap is $496 billion. Mastercard’s is $340 billion. What happens to those companies when a competitor shows up doing what they do for a tiny fraction of what they charge?

    I don’t own Solana, though perhaps I should. And if someone builds a company that makes payment processing on Solana easy for merchants, I just might have to wet my beak.

    More on tech:

    Robot Hands, Vertical Farms, and the Future of Food

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

    How Do You Know If a Startup Is Getting Traction?

    Photo: “R.I.P. Rest In Peace” by Beauteous Babe is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    iHerb

    The only place I buy vitamins and supplements. I recently placed an order and received it in less than 48 hours with free shipping! I compared the prices and they were lower than Amazon. I also love how they test a lot of the vitamins so that you know you’re getting what the label says. This isn’t always the case with supplements.

    Use this link to save 5%! 

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • NYC’s Best Chinese Noodles

    A wiry young man takes a small baton of dough from a tub. He flattens it and gives it a little stretch. Then, he quickly yanks it out to a length of several feet and dramatically slaps it back down. Whack, whack!

    This is Very Fresh Noodles in New York City. Found inside the cavernous Chelsea Market, it’s served chewy, hand pulled noodles to drooling patrons since 2016.

    I visited last Friday with my wife. I pretended to pore over the menu, but I knew what my stomach really needed: La Mei Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup.

    The bowl was soon in front of me, steaming and filled to the brim. Just picking up the noodles with your chopsticks will whet your appetite. They’re thick, luscious, and glistening from the broth.

    I greedily shoveled them into my mouth. The texture and flavor were perfect. The soup was aromatic and spicy, tasting of star anise. The beef is rich, incredibly tender, and falls apart in your mouth. At first I looked for extra chili oil, but soon realized I didn’t need it. These spices have a delayed reaction!

    Very Fresh Noodles also has a scorching Dan Dan Mian and numerous vegetarian dishes, including the toothsome mock duck my wife ordered. There is counter seating inside and lots more comfortable seats along the sidewalk, some covered.

    I’ve never had better Chinese noodles. If you’re in the area, give it a try!

    Have a great Labor Day weekend everyone!

    More on food:

    The Best Bakery in NYC (It’s Not Levain)

    The Best Mexican Food Is In…New Jersey?

    NJ’s Best Apple Cider Donut

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    iHerb

    The only place I buy vitamins and supplements. I recently placed an order and received it in less than 48 hours with free shipping! I compared the prices and they were lower than Amazon. I also love how they test a lot of the vitamins so that you know you’re getting what the label says. This isn’t always the case with supplements.

    Use this link to save 5%! 

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • AMC Fails to Deliver Up 1088% in Latest Data

    Major new data just came out today from the SEC. It shows fails to deliver in AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. up 1088% in the first half of August:

    These fails to deliver sometimes happen for benign reasons. But when massive fails to deliver occur in a stock over a sustained period, it’s often a sign of naked short selling.

    Naked short selling is the illegal practice of intentionally selling shares short (betting against them) without ever borrowing the shares as required. This is a powerful tool to distort markets. Since you never have to actually obtain any shares, you can sell as much as you want, pushing down the price.

    The fails to deliver in AMC are truly enormous. And after falling significantly last month, they’re back with a vengeance. As of August 13, the last day in the series, AMC’s fails to deliver were 157 times larger than Apple’s. Apple is the largest stock in the market, at 113 times AMC’s market cap.

    How could there be so much questionable activity in such a small stock? I strongly suspect illegal trading, likely on the part of hedge funds.

    Maybe they’re trying to make back some of their losses.

    More on AMC:

    AMC #3 on Robinhood for September, Behind Only Apple & Tesla

    For Retail Traders, AMC Has Become the Only Meme Stock

    Short Sellers Lost $1 Billion Yesterday in AMC and GameStop

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    iHerb

    The only place I buy vitamins and supplements. I recently placed an order and received it in less than 48 hours with free shipping! I compared the prices and they were lower than Amazon. I also love how they test a lot of the vitamins so that you know you’re getting what the label says. This isn’t always the case with supplements.

    Use this link to save 5%! 

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • AMC #3 on Robinhood for September, Behind Only Apple & Tesla

    The seasons are changing but one thing is not: the incredible popularity of AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. among retail investors.

    Robinhood lists AMC at #3 on its leaderboard for September, behind only Apple and Tesla:

    Apple is the largest stock in the entire market, with a market cap of $2.6 trillion. That’s 113 times larger than AMC. Tesla is 32 times larger.

    AMC is more popular than massive companies like Amazon, Microsoft, or Walt Disney. It’s also significantly hotter than Robinhood Markets itself, at #12.

    Even more incredible is that AMC has held the #3 position for six months straight. AMC also holds the #3 spot on Fidelity.

    My understanding is that the Robinhood leaderboard reflects how many users own a particular stock, not the total amount held. So the amount of money in Apple, Tesla, or Amazon held by Robinhood accounts could be much greater than the amount in AMC, given those companies’ massive size.

    Nonetheless, when a $23 billion business is more widely held than some of the most powerful companies on earth, I stand up and take notice.

    More on AMC:

    Charting The Huge Drop in AMC Fails to Deliver

    For Retail Traders, AMC Has Become the Only Meme Stock

    Short Sellers Lost $1 Billion Yesterday in AMC and GameStop

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Photo: “Robin Hood sai à noite” by freddie boy is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    iHerb

    The only place I buy vitamins and supplements. I recently placed an order and received it in less than 48 hours with free shipping! I compared the prices and they were lower than Amazon. I also love how they test a lot of the vitamins so that you know you’re getting what the label says. This isn’t always the case with supplements.

    Use this link to save 5%! 

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

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

    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.

    More on China and tech:

    China’s Tech Crackdown Means Economic Decline

    China Is Crushing One of Its Most Innovative Companies

    How China’s Tech Industry Dies

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Photo: “Chinese Soldiers in The Forbidden City – Beijing, China” by Patrick Rodwell is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    iHerb

    The only place I buy vitamins and supplements. I recently placed an order and received it in less than 48 hours with free shipping! I compared the prices and they were lower than Amazon. I also love how they test a lot of the vitamins so that you know you’re getting what the label says. This isn’t always the case with supplements.

    Use this link to save 5%! 

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • Robot Hands, Vertical Farms, and the Future of Food

    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.”

    More on tech:

    CHINA’S TECH CRACKDOWN MEANS ECONOMIC DECLINE

    HOW TO GET INTERNET TO CUBA

    INSIDE A STARTUP ACCELERATOR DEMO DAY

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    iHerb

    The only place I buy vitamins and supplements. I recently placed an order and received it in less than 48 hours with free shipping! I compared the prices and they were lower than Amazon. I also love how they test a lot of the vitamins so that you know you’re getting what the label says. This isn’t always the case with supplements.

    Use this link to save 5%! 

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

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

    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!

    More on food:

    THE BEST MEXICAN FOOD IS IN…NEW JERSEY?

    NJ’S BEST APPLE CIDER DONUT

    THE BEST BAKERY IN NYC (IT’S NOT LEVAIN)

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    iHerb

    The only place I buy vitamins and supplements. I recently placed an order and received it in less than 48 hours with free shipping! I compared the prices and they were lower than Amazon. I also love how they test a lot of the vitamins so that you know you’re getting what the label says. This isn’t always the case with supplements.

    Use this link to save 5%! 

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • For Retail Traders, AMC Has Become the Only Meme Stock

    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.

    More on AMC and hedge funds:

    SHORT SELLERS LOST $1 BILLION YESTERDAY IN AMC AND GAMESTOP

    CHARTING THE HUGE DROP IN AMC FAILS TO DELIVER

    HEDGE FUNDS HIT HARD BY MEME STOCK LOSSES, BADLY BEHIND S&P 500

    Photo: “We’re #1” by 6S is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    iHerb

    The only place I buy vitamins and supplements. I recently placed an order and received it in less than 48 hours with free shipping! I compared the prices and they were lower than Amazon. I also love how they test a lot of the vitamins so that you know you’re getting what the label says. This isn’t always the case with supplements.

    Use this link to save 5%! 

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • Short Sellers Lost $1 Billion Yesterday in AMC and GameStop

    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

    More on AMC and meme stocks:

    CHARTING THE HUGE DROP IN AMC FAILS TO DELIVER

    HEDGE FUNDS HIT HARD BY MEME STOCK LOSSES, BADLY BEHIND S&P 500

    HEDGE FUNDS GET SPECIAL TREATMENT DURING MARGIN CALLS

    Photo: “Fitness” by Walimai.photo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

    If you’re approved for this card, you get a $100 Amazon gift card. You also get up to 5% back on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases, 2% on restaurants/gas stations/cell phone bills, and 1% everywhere else.

    Best of all: No fee!

    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    iHerb

    The only place I buy vitamins and supplements. I recently placed an order and received it in less than 48 hours with free shipping! I compared the prices and they were lower than Amazon. I also love how they test a lot of the vitamins so that you know you’re getting what the label says. This isn’t always the case with supplements.

    Use this link to save 5%! 

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order. 

  • Charting The Huge Drop in AMC Fails to Deliver

    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.

    More on AMC:

    NEW DATA SHOWS BIG DROP IN AMC FAILS TO DELIVER

    AMC HAS 35,000 TIMES THE FAILS-TO-DELIVER OF AMAZON

    HEDGE FUNDS HIT HARD BY MEME STOCK LOSSES, BADLY BEHIND S&P 500

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Reddit/etc. using the buttons at the bottom of the page. This helps more people find the blog! 

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    You already shop on Amazon. Why not save $100?

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    Fundrise

    This platform lets me diversify my real estate investments so I’m not too exposed to any one market. I’ve invested since 2018 and returns have been good so far. More on Fundrise in this post.

    If you decide to invest in Fundrise, you can use this link to get your management fees waived for 90 days. With their 1% management fee, this could save you $250 on a $100,000 account.

    iHerb

    The only place I buy vitamins and supplements. I recently placed an order and received it in less than 48 hours with free shipping! I compared the prices and they were lower than Amazon. I also love how they test a lot of the vitamins so that you know you’re getting what the label says. This isn’t always the case with supplements.

    Use this link to save 5%! 

    Misfits Market

    My wife and I have gotten organic produce shipped to our house by Misfits for over a year. It’s never once disappointed me. Every fruit and vegetable is super fresh and packed with flavor. I thought radishes were cold, tasteless little lumps at salad bars until I tried theirs! They’re peppery, colorful and crunchy! I wrote a detailed review of Misfits here.

    Use this link to sign up and you’ll save $10 on your first order.