Crumbs

The new Bear Cave newsletter (#53) is out. It has picked up that the ARK ETF(s) may implode.

Other bearish tickers:

1/ Why are there so many SPACs?

Answer 1: Great economics for sponsor (average of 20% of money raised upon deSPAC / merging with a target, Eg $400M SPAC = $80M). It’s like a separate carried interest pool for each company and liquid since already public!

— Alex Rampell (@arampell) February 14, 2021

The Spruce Point Newsletter defends short sellers in general, and comments that:

• Leidos ($LDOS) is badly managed, possibly fraudulent, and (therefore) overvalued.
• Wolfpack Research is bearish on Remark Holdings ($MARK). Not sure why (video link). Quite interesting chart:
• And on EHang, with a powerful effect:
• How long will students pay for housing they cannot occupy?. Bearish for LSE:UTG.

Wrap

Globally pretty risk off.

• most global equity indexes down, apart from the antiquated Dow Jones Industrial Average, which squeezed out another 0.34% to reach yet another all-time high,
• fairly quiet on the foreign exchange desks, except the Brazilian Real (BRL) was down 0.74% and the Swiss Franc something similar!
• yields up everywhere, even Germany. This is risk on, but the moves are not large,
• energy commodities generally up, precious metals down, except platinum, probably, which has been going parabolic lately,
• FAANG gang mostly up. Apple down 1.85%

Generally, a slow news day. FOMC meeting a damp squib (no change in policy foreseen), industrial output, and prices, both rising strongly. Producer prices went up 1.3% in January: if this keeps going, the Fed will end up tightening before the year is out.

Comment

Prince Philip, the DoE, was admitted to hospital. The institution of the monarchy in Britain is a bizarre overhang of something that once was politically important. The UK establishment, especially the upper classes, has a great talent for absorbing all sorts in order to profit from them. This was rather elegantly explained in Bagehot’s recent column in the Economist Magazine.