Read in the emails

$EPD has some insiders buying. This stock has been widely recommended for a long time, without acquiring any kind of trend. Maybe this news, together with some positive figures, will move the needle.

Read Seeking Alpha for more detail.

Equities and Crypto

Scarily, crypto has acquired all the attributes of another asset class. It’s treated rather like equities. This post explains that the equivalent of prime brokers already exist for crypto, in the form of Coinbase. I guess that crypto is no less tradeable than ‘normal’ currencies, and it’s reasonable to provide a platform to allow people to trade them. Trading is going to be a zero sum game (negative, once Coinbase have got paid) but people join such games all the time.

Does this really make sense? Not to me it doesn’t, but time will tell.

Is this the end of DeFi as we know it, Jim?

This post by Doomberg argues that once the lumbering SEC starts to look closely at DeFi, it’ll just crater. I don’t know enough about either the SEC or DeFi to know if this correct, but I cannot believe that it will be allowed to continue in its current unregulated form for much longer. Governments abhor an unregulated sector, especially anything to do with finance, so I feel that it’s coming. I imagine that the rest of the sector, which is heavily regulated, it lobbying hard to end this example of regulatory arbitrage. Will this be the end? No idea, but it’ll be a body blow.

1.5 is dead – it’s just a question of when the politicians will acknowledge this

I am not a climate denier. I think that the climate is changing, and that we are at least in part to blame. But I believe that the economic cost of reducing CO~2~ sufficiently to reverse warming is too much for voters to bear.

This article points out that the politics won’t work. Countries will not agree to actions which will result in economic costs. The idea that the UK can do stupid stuff and that this will amount to “leadership” which will result in others doing the same stupid stuff is … stupid.

There is a great deal of ruin on this planet, and a lot of it can be fixed cheaply. We could revive the Doha round of the GATT, and allow developing economies to export agricultural produce to the developed world. We’d get cheaper food, they’d get more resources. Oh, but the powerful farming and land-owning lobbies wouldn’t like it, so it’s not going to happen. This is the real tragedy.

Matt Levine

This guy is amazingly good. So good, I’d probably pay to read his stuff. Well, maybe. But he has a free newsletter, so it’s even better!

Today’s post was on Zillow, and being too successful in short selling. The Zillow post explains why trying to cheat dumb home owners by trying to get them to sell for less than their home is worth is not great marketing for the larger business.

The short-selling piece is excellent. It points out that to be a successful short seller, you have to have an exit. You need to close your short (to ‘cover’). If you’ve shorted a total Ponzi, and it happens to be exposed while you have your short on, you may end up not being able to exit the position. Also, your shorted stock may end up being turned into a “meme stock” and pumped on Wall Street Bets. Or be the next Tesla. Maybe the same thing.