Tremendous

An angel investor's take on life and business

  • Engineering an AMC Short Squeeze in Dark Pools

    It’s no secret that investors in meme stocks like AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. yearn to engineer a short squeeze. This vertiginous ascent in the stock’s price crushes short sellers, who must buy the shares to close their position and stop the bleeding.

    It’s easiest to engineer a squeeze in a heavily shorted stock. Then, many shorts have to cover all at once, providing heavy demand for the shares and pushing the price higher.

    If you look at the short interest in AMC shares, it doesn’t look particularly high, at 18%. But there’s another metric that tells a very different story.

    AMC’s dark pool short interest is a whopping 51%…a majority of shares outstanding. If that figure were repeated in public markets, it would make AMC the #5 most shorted stock in existence.

    The short sales may not show up on the NYSE, but they’re there. And in massive numbers.

    So it may be a lot easier than it appears for retail traders to squeeze AMC shares.

    Most retail orders go to dark pools. Since brokers tend to process their orders in the dark pools, retail traders could squeeze the short sellers even on this private platform.

    To be clear, this is a high risk, speculative trade. I wouldn’t attempt it because the high risk bucket of my investments goes into tech startups.

    But it just might work.

    More on markets:

    Citadel Holding Nearly $500 Million in AMC Options

    How Did High Dividend Stocks Perform In the Last Crash?

    Citadel Can’t Beat the S&P 500, Despite High Fees

    Photo: “Nuts in a….” by ClawzCTR is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Facebook/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 great 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. 

    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. 

  • Why I Just Invested in Deft, the Best Way to Shop Online

    We’re back!

    Sorry I missed you guys Friday. I wasn’t feeling well.

    Fortunately, it wasn’t COVID and I’m back to 100%. And I’m really excited about today’s company: Deft.

    E-commerce search is broken.

    Don’t believe me? Type in a simple search like “pet friendly sectional under $5000” on Google or Amazon.

    The results are mostly irrelevant ads and sofa covers, not actual sofas. The brands are trusted names like HDCAXKJ.

    That’s why Zach created Deft, the best way to shop online.

    Type that search into Deft and you’ll see relevant results from top brands. This saves you time and money.

    You can even hire a personal shopper through Deft for a small monthly fee! 

    I knew people would pay for a personal shopper when I noticed they pay to skip the security line at the airport (through a company called Clear). Some people have more money than time. 

    Deft is currently in beta. I encourage you to check it out!

    One day, this will be the standard for e-commerce search and perhaps many other search categories as well. I’m delighted to be an investor!

    Check out Zach on the This Week in Startups podcast!

    More on tech:

    Why You Should Never Raise a $100 Million Seed Round

    How to Ace a 3 Minute Pitch

    Why I Just Invested in Kippo, Where Gamers Find Love

    Photo: “Online shopping” by Robbert Noordzij is licensed under CC BY 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Facebook/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 great 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. 

    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. 

  • 85% of Hedge Funds Are Monitoring Retail Traders

    Retail traders were once an afterthought in the stock market. Those days are over.

    Anxious to know retail’s next move, nearly all hedge funds are monitoring retail traders on social media:

    Fund managers who might have once derided small-time day traders as “dumb money” are scouring social-media posts for clues about where the herd might veer next. Some 85% of hedge funds and 42% of asset managers are now tracking retail-trading message boards, according to a survey by Bloomberg Intelligence.

    J.P. Morgan is offering a product to top clients that helps them predict retail traders’ next move. Those high dollar clients are likely hedge funds:

    Data shared with clients include the size of retail flows, the most discussed stocks on social media and companies that are likely to face a retail ‘squeeze’ — when small investors rush to a stock that hedge funds are betting against. 

    This comes as retail traders form an ever-larger part of the market. From the WSJ:

    Individual traders in 2021 purchased a net $292 billion of U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds, according to Vanda Research’s VandaTrack platform, which tracks and sells data on the purchases of U.S. equities by individual investors. That is more than seven times the amount in 2019. Individual investors so far appear poised to continue similar levels of buying activity in 2022.

    But it will be hard for retail traders to outmaneuver hedge funds if they always know retail’s next move. The solution may be to adopt a tool long used by crypto traders: encrypted messaging.

    Applications like Signal, Telegram or Whatsapp make it easy to form groups and send encrypted messages. This could be a good way for retail traders to organize and coordinate trades.

    After all, it’s much easier to burn hedge funds in a short squeeze when they don’t know you’re about to start buying the stock.

    I’m curious to see if retail stock traders will adopt secure messaging technology as a weapon against hedge funds. In the mean time, remember: Big Brother is watching you.

    More on markets:

    Citadel Holding Nearly $500 Million in AMC Options

    Solana Is the Most Popular Crypto of 2022

    Citadel Can’t Beat the S&P 500, Despite High Fees

    Photo: “Big Brother is watching you” by duncan is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Facebook/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 great 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. 

    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 Drop 98%

    After hitting over 400,000 in mid-December, fails to deliver in shares of AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. dropped 98% to close out 2021.

    The latest data, released today by the SEC, follows a long-term pattern in the stock. Fails to deliver bounce around at high levels for much of the month, only to disappear at month’s end.

    Let me be clear just how out of line fails to deliver in the tens and hundreds of thousands are for AMC. Here are the fails to deliver for some of the largest companies in the world, based on the latest data set:

    Microsoft Corporation: 527

    Apple Inc: 61,677

    Amazon.com Inc: 57

    Tesla Inc: 0

    Meta Platforms Inc: 0

    Keep in mind, many of these companies are hundreds of times the size of AMC by market cap. So even when AMC fails to deliver are at just a few thousand, they’re way out of line for a stock its size.

    So why would such a relatively tiny company have so many failed trades?

    Such a persistent pattern of large fails to deliver is often evidence of illegal naked short selling.

    A persistent pattern of large fails to deliver is often evidence of illegal naked short selling. #AMC $AMC
    https://tremendous.blog

    This involves selling short shares one does not own. Naked short selling is a powerful tactic to push down a share’s price.

    If you’re not limited by having to borrow shares, you can sell forever!

    So why do these fails to deliver tend to get cleaned up at the end of the month? Perhaps someone at the exchange or the SEC doesn’t like how it looks to end a month with a large number of failed trades, and insists they settle.

    But they pop right back up soon after…perhaps once a superior’s back is turned.

    I expect to continue to see massive numbers of failed trades in AMC shares on a regular basis until the SEC steps up and solves this problem once and for all.

    More on markets:

    AMC Fails to Deliver Soar Past 400,000

    Solana Is the Most Popular Crypto of 2022

    AMC Fails to Deliver Are a Massive Outlier

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Facebook/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 great 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. 

    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. 

  • Why You Should Never Raise a $100 Million Seed Round

    Markets are hot. And your startup is growing fast.

    Time to raise money at the highest price you can get…right?

    Wrong. Lately, I’ve seen companies raising seed rounds at valuations of $125 and even $150 million.

    A few years ago, a typical seed round valuation was more like $5 to $10 million. Now, that’s beginning to look quaint.

    Getting the highest possible price for your company sounds great, but comes with some serious pitfalls. Here’s why you should resist the temptation to swing for the fences:

    1) You don’t have enough time grow into the valuation. Companies I’ve seen raising seed rounds at $100 million or more often have little or no revenue.

    Meanwhile, tech companies today are IPO-ing at about 15 times revenue. So for your company to truly be worth $100 million, you need about $6.7 million a year in revenue.

    Most companies raise enough money in a fundraising round to last 12-18 months. The cash will rarely last more than 2 years.

    Can you go from little or no revenue to $6.7 million a year in just 12-24 months? Doubtful.

    What happens if you can’t? A down round, or raising money at a lower valuation.

    This will upset your existing investors, who quickly book a loss on their stake. It also is a strong negative signal for your company that could impair your future.

    2) You get the bad investors and repel the good ones. Astute investors know they cannot make money on $100 million seed rounds.

    So who will you get instead? Novices who will provide bad advice and offer few connections.

    Your company will be much better served in the long term if you have Sequoia on your cap table. Their name, the advice they can provide, and the doors they can open will be invaluable.

    But if you’re raising at an unrealistic valuation, they’re unlikely to participate.

    I know that getting a huge bag of money for a tiny slice of your company is appealing. But if you want to maximize the long term value of your startup, raising at a more reasonable valuation is the ticket.

    Aim for a seed round between $8-25 million, depending on how much traction you have. Then get to work building.

    There will be plenty of time to score that giant valuation later!

    More on tech:

    A Day in the Life of an Angel Investor

    Is Fathom the Future of Blockchain?

    How to Ace a 3 Minute Pitch

    Photo: “Galvez St Louis Stop Sign Grove 2” by Infrogmation is licensed under CC BY 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Facebook/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 great 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. 

    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. 

  • Solana Is the Most Popular Crypto of 2022

    In what’s begun as a tough year for cryptocurrencies, Solana has attracted more investors than any other coin. The high speed network landed $6 million in inflows so far this year.

    Larger competitors like Bitcoin and Ethereum have seen outflows in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars.

    What I find particularly striking is that Solana’s market cap is only a fraction the size of its larger peers. Bitcoin has a total value around $800 billion, and Ethereum nearly $400 billion.

    Meanwhile, Solana is worth just $44 billion. Nonetheless, it managed to beat these much larger protocols in attracting investors.

    This is a pattern I expect to continue long term. Solana can process tens of thousands of transactions per second for virtually nothing.

    Compare that to Ethereum, where completing a single transaction costs about $46!

    Would merchants accept a credit card that cost them $46 in transaction fees every time someone used it? Of course not.

    Ethereum’s high fees will severely limit its use cases until the fees come down.

    Bitcoin looks better at about $2 a transaction. But Solana charges mere fractions of a cent.

    A new technology that’s dramatically faster and cheaper will win, regardless of the market. I expect Solana to continue to gain value relative to the older protocols.

    At least until a swifter competitor enters the ring!

    More on tech:

    How Solana Could Wipe Out Visa and MasterCard

    A Day in the Life of an Angel Investor

    Is Fathom the Future of Blockchain?

    Photo: “Solana Beach, CA Neon Sign” by JoeInSouthernCA is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

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

    Amazon Business American Express Card

    Save Money on Stuff I Use:

    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.

    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. 

  • Citadel Funds Vaccine, Election Conspiracy Platform

    I came across some truly bizarre information today. Hedge fund Citadel LLC is a major funder of Rumble, a video website known for promoting conspiracies on vaccines and elections:

    A simple search for the word “vaccine” on Rumble’s homepage returned three times more videos with misinformation than accurate claims, according to research published in Wired Magazine. Rumble’s presentation and distribution of video content amplified misinformation about vaccines and elections more than any other topics, according to the study’s findings.

    Citadel is deeply involved:

    When Rumble went public on December 1st, 2021, it did so with significant financial backing of Ken Griffin’s Chicago-based hedge fund, Citadel Advisers. The Chicago-based hedge fund pooled together funds in February of 2021 to form a a special-purpose acquisition company or “SPAC” (CF Acquisition Corp. VI VI). The Griffin-backed shell company officially “merged” with Rumble. It holds 826,864 shares in Rumble, which are now worth $8,028,849 and amounts to the fifth largest holding position in Rumble.

    Sure enough, when I searched “vaccine” on Rumble just now, unproven conspiracies dominated the results:


    If Citadel is anything like most hedge funds, its investors are almost all institutions: university endowments, pension funds, charitable endowments, etc. The last thing they want is controversy.

    Citadel is seriously jeopardizing its reputation and investor base by being involved in a company like this. Even as someone who only invests his own capital, I wouldn’t touch Rumble.

    This comes in addition to CEO Ken Griffin personally funding lawmakers like Devin Nunes who refused to certify the election.

    If you’re one of the richest men in the country, you already have a target on your back. If you use those billions to fund conspiracy theorists and get your investors involved without their consent, you’re asking for trouble.

    Expect to see politicians and investors piling on Citadel in ever greater numbers.

    What do you think of Citadel investing in Rumble? Leave a comment at the bottom and let me know!

    This is the last blog for this week. See you Monday and have a great weekend!

    More on markets:

    Citadel Can’t Beat the S&P 500, Despite High Fees

    How Solana Could Wipe Out Visa and MasterCard

    AMC Fails to Deliver Soar Past 400,000

    Photo: Citadel LLC CEO Kenneth Griffin

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Facebook/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.

    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. 

  • Is Fathom the Future of Blockchain?

    I was blown away when I read how fast Solana can process transactions. But there’s a new kid on the block: Fathom.

    Fathom is even faster than Solana on one important metric:

    Solana averages 50,000 transactions per second, versus 14 per second on Ethereum. Fantom is not as fast as Solana, but it’s still way ahead of Ethereum; in a test run back in 2018, its blockchain processed 25,000 transactions per second. But Fantom has a pretty solid claim to being the fastest blockchain if you look at time to finality. This is arguably the most important statistic, as that’s the moment when a transaction has been fully validated on the chain. Fantom’s time to finality is about a second, versus 13 seconds on Solana and more than a minute on Ethereum.

    To me, the metrics that matter are:

    1) How long until my transaction is done?
    2) How much does it cost?

    Both Solana and Fathom are very cheap to run, and Fathom seems a little faster in finalizing transactions.

    Both are light years ahead of Ethereum. I would expect to see Ethereum slowly fade unless there’s a major update to leapfrog the newer protocols.

    Fathom is worth about $7 billion today. Could it one day be worth 100 times that, my bar for highly speculative investments?

    I think it’s possible. Visa and Mastercard together are worth $830 billion. Add in American Express, and you’re at almost $1 trillion.

    And that doesn’t cover banks that charge tons of wire fees. A protocol that could replace these high fees with near-zero ones could be worth $1 trillion or more.

    The question is, which blockchain will dominate? I don’t know.

    I would favor backing a lot of promising tokens early in the hope that one of them returns 100 or 1000 times one’s initial investment.

    This is the same approach I take investing in startups. It can work well when there are numerous small, promising competitors and the likelihood of a winner-take-all outcome.

    But buying all those tokens is a lot of work! An ideal investment vehicle would be an ETF that owns all the major coins (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, etc.) and another that owns high speed smaller coins (Fathom, Near, etc.).

    The SEC does not allow ETFs to directly hold cryptocurrency. Like so much of what the SEC does, this policy is counterproductive.

    It should should approve crypto ETFs so that investors can spread their bets. If the government’s goal is protecting people’s savings, anything that aids diversification is a plus.

    I’m excited to see what the future of finance will look like!

    We may soon be living in a world where you can send anyone money in seconds for (almost) free. A world in which politicians can’t devalue your savings on a whim.

    That’s a future worth building for!

    More on tech:

    A Day in the Life of an Angel Investor

    How Solana Could Wipe Out Visa and MasterCard

    This Week in the Venture Bubble

    Photo: “Computer Circuit Board” by Defence Images is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Facebook/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.

    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. 

  • A Day in the Life of an Angel Investor

    Not that kind of angel!

    You’ve heard of angel investors and their big brothers, venture capitalists. But what does an angel investor actually do in a day?

    I thought I’d break down my day today so you can see how the sausage is made:

    1) Read deal memos in inbox. It could be as few as 2-4, or it could be as many as 12 or more.

    Since I invest in seed stage startups, I generally look for some traction and a valuation of about $10-15 million. I like to see companies with 6 months of revenue, growing 20% or more month over month.

    The traction and valuation criteria eliminate about 99% of startups right off the bat.

    2) Send over a developer candidate to one of my companies. Looks like they like him!

    Adding value through intros to possible employees and investors is a big part of an angel’s job. I try my darnedest to help the companies I’ve invested in.

    I found this candidate via a Slack community for developers. Finding good developers who don’t already have a job is very difficult nowadays.

    But I still try! One great engineer can make a huge difference to an early stage startup.

    3) Answer LinkedIn messages. Usually the deal flow here isn’t great, but sometimes it can be excellent!

    Don’t discount cold messages. Jason Calacanis found LeadIQ because the founder cold e-mailed him, and now the company is worth over $200 million!

    4) Read about the industry as a whole. Every day, I try to learn more about technology investing as a whole, not just the companies that cross my desk.

    Today I read about how founders can get investors to work for them. I also read about finding the sweet spot between valuation and traction, which will inform me as I read tomorrow’s deal memos!

    5) Attend a Q&A w/ two expert angel investors tonight!

    Being an angel investor is about continuous learning, first and foremost.

    You learn about new companies every day and select that 1 in 100 (or more) you want to invest in. And you learn about technology and business in general, which makes you a better investor!

    This constant opportunity to learn is one of the things I like best about angel investing. You see companies doing everything from 3D printing human tissue to revolutionizing e-commerce search.

    There’s seldom a dull day!

    What have you always wondered about angel investing? Let me know in the comments at the bottom!

    Have a great day everyone!

    More on tech:

    This Week in the Venture Bubble

    How to Ace a 3 Minute Pitch

    The High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People

    Photo: “Earth Angel” by drburtoni is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Facebook/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.

    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. 

  • Citadel Can’t Beat the S&P 500, Despite High Fees

    Citadel LLC trailed the S&P 500 in 2021, returning 26.3% to the market’s 29%.

    Citadel charges as much as 5% or more of the fund’s assets every year, in addition to 20% of all gains. These fees are among the highest of any investment fund.

    Why should investors pay such massive fees when the Vanguard S&P 500 Index Fund Admiral fund (which I own) charges a mere 0.04% of assets with no performance fee?

    The only possible justification would be returns that are consistently far higher than the market’s. While Citadel’s Wellington fund has outperformed the market in some years, such as 2020, its performance is inconsistent.

    Few hedge funds have consistently beat the market. Jim Simon’s Medallion fund has returned 39% a year net of fees annually since 1988, but is closed to new investors.

    Perhaps this underperformance is why Citadel is trying to make it harder for investors to withdraw their money.

    Unless a fund can consistently beat the market by a wide margin, high fees will make it a losing investment. Hedge funds sound mysterious and awesome, but you may do better with boring old Vanguard!

    More on markets:

    AMC Fails to Deliver Soar Past 400,000

    How Solana Could Wipe Out Visa and MasterCard

    Citadel Holding Nearly $500 Million in AMC Options

    Photo: Citadel LLC CEO Kenneth Griffin

    If you found this post interesting, please share it on Twitter/Facebook/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.

    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.