1. If you turn on CNBC, you'll hear a narrative that reckless retail investors from Reddit are destabilizing the stock market by driving up prices for GameStop and other stocks.

This is BS.

Follow along if interested.

1. While @RonDeSantisFL was fighting the culture wars, banning CRT and shipping migrants to Martha's Vineyard, he failed to meaningfully address Florida's dysfunctional and collapsing property insurance market

And now things are going to get much

2. Florida's property insurance system was in crisis even though the state had not been struck by a major hurricane since 2018.

Then Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida's west coast, killing at least 74 people and inflicting tens of billions of dollars in property damage.

3. Florida property faces catastrophic risks from weather events that worsen each year due to climate change.

Floridians pay an average of "$4,231 a year per [property insurance] policy, compared to a US average of $1,544."

4. In the last five years, six Florida insurance companies have gone out of business "without responding to a hurricane, and four more are in the process of liquidation."

5. The collapsing market has left many Floridians reliant on the Citizens Property Insurance Corp., a state-run agency that is supposed to be the "insurer of last resort." It now provides property insurance for more than 1 million

1. Texas Republicans just released the text of its voter suppression bill, SB7

Votes will be held before midnight Sunday

The bill includes a NEW PROVISION that allows judges to OVERTURN AN ELECTION "WITHOUT DETERMINING HOW INDIVIDUAL VOTERS VOTED"

Follow along if interested

2. This section appears to validate Trump's claims that he won various states because a certain number of people voted "illegally" without any other details

Now people like Guiliani can take these absurd allegations to court and, with a sympathetic judge, OVERTURN AN ELECTION

3. Texas is poised to adopt this unprecedented and radical legal provision without ANY DEBATE IN EITHER CHAMBER

It was negotiated in a secret conference committee and released on a Saturday of a holiday weekend

And there is plenty of other bad stuff in this bill

4. The final bill text also:

Bans drive-thru voting and voting after 9PM (used disproportionately by voters of color in Harris County)

Bans voting on Sundays before 1PM (Souls to the polls)

Makes it more difficult for people with disabilities to vote by mail

5. I'll keep this thread updated with more information about Texas' SB7. It completely overhauls the state's voting system and was just made public a few hours ago.

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1. Today, 130+ GOP members of Congress will vote to ignore millions of voters and try to install Trump for a second term.

We reviewed thousands of FEC records to find the top corporate donors to this group.

Follow along if interested.

2. Top corporate donors to 138 Republican members of Congress voting to subvert democracy:

@ATT ($2M, 130 members)
@Comcast ($1.7M, 126 members)
@UPS ($1.5M, 121 members)
@Deloitte ($1.3M, 90 members)
@EY_US ($1.2M, 79 members)
@PwC (890K, 71

3. Top corporate donors to 138 Republican members of Congress voting to subvert democracy (con't):

@UnitedHealthGrp (749K, 73 members)
@Delta (710K, 86 members)
@KPMG (693K, 67 members)
@Walmart (679K, 111 members)
@Pfizer (610K, 74

4. Top corporate donors to 138 Republican members of Congress voting to subvert democracy (con't):

@Google (610K, 75 members)
@Amazon (598K, 104 members)
@Microsoft (505K, 83 members)
@Lowes (498K, 69 members)
@BankofAmerica (448K, 51

5. Top corporate donors to 138 Republican members of Congress voting to subvert democracy (con't):

@CapitalOne (375K, 50 members)
@WellsFargo (322K, 55 members)
@AnheuserBusch (302K, 38 members)
@bostonsci (274K, 54

No one is going to do it for you

A thread...

As a founder, if you won't show up every single day, despite how you are feeling, or how the startup is doing or what the press is writing about you, or your cofounders not working out, or your product failing or your customers shouting

No one is going to do it for you

As a student, if you won't do things that scare you, that make you feel nervous, that challenge you, that intimidate you, that you have always wanted to do but never gathered the courage to

No one is going to do it for you

In your first job, if you are not going to make an effort to know how things have happened before and why, to meet new people, to seek help, to ask for feedback, to be patient with results, to not seek "impact" in the first month itself

No one is going to do it for you

If as a son/daughter you are not going to realize what your parents went through while growing up, that they want the same things from your life that you want for your self, that their path is different but there are reasons why

No one is going to do it for you

The interview with CNBC of @chamath is a much watch because there is so much insight hidden underneath.

There are many things that caught my attention. The one thing was the abstraction that hedge fund strategies are all 'momentum' plays. What it seems to imply is that the marshaling of resources at an opportune time drives the future behavior of a stock.

From basic physics, we know that momentum is mass times velocity. So any 'momentum' tactic employs the variation of mass, velocity or both. Wrt stocks, mass is money and velocity is speed of trade.

We cannot argue that there are benefits of scale associated with having more money. Also, high-frequency trading has shown the value of high-speed trading. So in an abstract sense, market manipulation can involve a kind of momentum play.

The objective of stock trading is to buy a financial instrument at a low price and sell it at a higher price. The purpose of a momentum play is to front-run the decision process of other traders such that one acquires the assets before a decision is made.

It's endlessly fascinating how economic datapoints get interpreted.

When I was in charge of a P&L, the guy who ran Finance for us and I had what we called the 'shelf plan.'

There were maybe 3-4 of us who knew it existed.

What's a shelf plan?
1/

Well it's a plan you keep on the shelf (full FP&A model), that you hope you never have to use.

It reduces forward hires, cuts back various line items (typically ad spend, travel, that sort of thing).

Oh, it also has a big fat RIF in there.

That's why we don't talk about it.
2/

Why have a plan instead of winging it?

Because this is where companies (particularly young companies) sometimes err. They do little cuts - 2-3% here and there, preserving as much headcount as they can, that sort of thing.

This is incorrect.
3/

If you're at the point where you need to make material changes to your forward P&L, at 2-3% RIF will be followed by another.

And another.

And this series of progressive cuts will cripple morale, incrementally reducing the productivity of the staff you retain to survive.
4/

And so the shelf plan cuts deep.

Your goal is to go from being a peacetime machine to a wartime machine, so you gotta lean out quick. Can't do that without a plan, hence the need to have one.

~30% cut is what you need.

And then you need to tell everyone left they're safe.
5/