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I have started a position in $SSPK.
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SPAC - $SSPK Silver Spike Acquisition Comp

They are merging with WM Holdings, Inc who owns Weedmaps. Founded in 2008. Lead by CEO Chris Beals. Former life-sciences attorney (important - will come in later).


Basic Description:

The business is a two-sided marketplace which serves customers and sellers of marijuana products.

Who are they?

On the consumer side, https://t.co/sHZKPFCY7I which is a marketplace for standardized marijuana products.

Weed Maps is the world’s largest base of cannabis users with over 10M MAUs, 90% of which are cannabis users, and a stunning 70% are DAILY users.


A key part of the marketplace is the differentiation between alcohol/tobacco and cannabis. Cannabis is *not* a standardized product so Weedmaps compiles millions of data points from strain traits, user feedback, effects, etc., to suggest the best products for the user.

Weedmaps is operating at a 1.5B GMV run rate. With cannabis illegal on the Federal level, they do not currently take a percentage of this GMW but stated that they plan to with Federal legalization.
The proposal for $2000 stimulus checks is divisive, and not along simple left-right lines. Lots of disagreement among progressives, with people like Bernie Sanders very pro but many others not on board. Both sides have a point 1/

My take: the economics aren't very good, but the political economy may make such checks necessary 2/
https://t.co/XY7d9E8SDY


The key economic argument, which @crampell picks up on, is that given a slump that has affected people very unevenly, aid should concentrate on those actually suffering 3/

So if you have a fixed amount to spend, unemployment benefits and maybe small-business aid should be priorities, not checks that will in many cases go to people who are doing OK 4/

But is there a fixed amount to spend? No binding budget constraint for the feds, so this is all about politics. And my sense is that broad issuance of checks is actually kind of a loss leader, helping to sell a package that includes UI 5/
Some reflections on trading psychology...
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Trading is as simple as "do you think it will go up or do you think it will go down", yet this is one of the hardest jobs I've ever experienced and I've been lucky (or so I'm told) to have experienced a few - musician, pe associate, baker, biz owner, insurance underwriter.
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But with this simplistic binary proposition comes a tremendous amount of pitfalls which is well explained imv by Daniel Kahneman’s book “thinking fast and slow”, that illustrates a lot of why traders succumb to these pitfalls time and time again...
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And that is, Humans are innately horrible (horrible) traders. And it's no wonder why trading has an extremely low success rate. As I've come to realise from reading that book some years ago, we - Humans, tend be risk-averse when winning, that is to say...
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we tend to take our profits or whatever we have gained quickly; and tend to be risk-seeking when losing in that we tend to let our losses or whatever we may lose a chance (or give more risk) to recoup what we could end up losing.
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