The freelancing blueprint 🧵👇

1/x The window we have been targeting for 2 months has officially opened... i Can not imagine a more textbook display of the power of Vanna at expiration as we saw on Friday. The capital building was overrun by an insurrection, but all that that meant was a bigger late day rally.

2/x that ended at ATH on the close. Between Gary the 🦍 & his RVol suppression & his hand off to late day Ivol compression & the Vanna index bid, the 🐻’s never had a chance... but Gary’s getting tired after 2 months battling complacency & Vanna’s 2 week vacation, 1 of her only

3/x 2 week departures of the year (a 5 week OpEx) is quickly approaching on 1/15 morning. That means she’ll be increasingly absent as she prepares for her trip. W/ a $59 1 week straddle & $50 1 day range on Friday, & another $30 overnight drop, it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t

4/x want to take a chance on a little long gamma at this juncture. Especially given the obvious warning signs coming from the steepening of the yield curve, underperformance of the Growth complex, complacency in sentiment & positioning, anecdotal signs of bubbles in BTC & TSLA,

5/x NTM the growing exuberance surrounding a fiscal stimulus deal near $2 Trillion. The wall of worry of 3 months ago is gone. The vaccine is being deployed, the election is resolved, fiscal stimulus was passed & w/2 Georgia 🍑 🍑, ever moar 🚁💰is on the way. But what happened

Red Bull is a weird and fascinating company.

- $7.4 billion in 2020 revenue
- 43% energy drink market
- Makes nothing

Nope, not even the drinks they sell. Instead, they focus 100% on marketing.

Here's what's going on

1/

Before Red Bull there was Krating Daeng (KD).

Founded by pharmaceutical entrepreneur, Chaleo Yoovidhya, KD was created to serve Thailand's country's working class.

Yoovidhya chose the gaur, a member of the bovine family from the region, as the brand's symbol.

2/

Dietrich Mateschitz was a toothpaste marketer. On a business trip to Thailand he discovered KD and fell in love with the drink.

With Yoovidhya, he decided to bring it to Europe. He made changes:

- Name became "Red Bull"
- Added bubbles
- Used a thin can
- Targeted elites

3/

The deal Mateschitz and Yoovidhya struck outsourced production of the drink to the Thai entrepreneur's pharmaceutical company.

That fundamental structure has remained in place today: Red Bull outsources production and focuses on distribution (marketing).

4/

Mateschitz noticed the rise of extreme sports starting in the 1990s. He thought Red Bull should be a part of it.

The years since have seen the company amass an insane empire across sports, media, and apparel.

Compliance is fundamentally at odds with innovation and continuous improvement

Compliance tends to constrain operations to narrow sets of approved sequences of tasks as the means to assure the secure attainment of certain business outcomes. But at what cost ?

🧵

Operational practices have an emergent nature to them. They’re affected by people, their expertise, their relationships, their team goals, role perceptions and also member needs as humans and professionals.
In this entangled mess of variables, aspects practice-as-done are

Constantly morphed as a response to economic pressures (deadlines, business demands), workload demands (as people tend to automate or agree patterns to reduce cognitive load of tasks and become more efficient) and understanding of safety and security related barriers.

All of these tend to be fluid and non fixed. In this continuous interaction with the environment and different pressures acting on it, there are numerous opportunities for improvements which have local relevance and emerge out of local needs and interactions of elements. However

In order to do so, and to support innovation and continuous improvement the practices need to have a requisite level of variability so practitioners exercise their Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feel) for what works and what doesn’t, within their constraints and pressures

THREAD: The story of the week in finance is how a group of retail traders at @wallstreetbets, with assists from @ElonMusk and @Chamath, took down the establishment short sellers at GameStop.

A thread on the underlying mechanics of the $GME saga...

1/ First, for those unfamiliar with the business, GameStop is a videogame and merchandise retailer.

It has >5,000 stores, primarily in malls, across North America, Europe, and Australia.

The business has struggled to modernize, hurting its financial and stock performance.

2/ For a variety of business reasons, a bull (i.e. optimistic) case regarding its future performance has formed.

It really came to the forefront after RC Ventures, an entity managed by Chewy founder @ryancohen, disclosed a large position and assumed three board seats.

3/ @ryancohen summarized his case, stating:

"We are excited to bring our customer-obsessed mindset and technology experience to GameStop and its strategic assets...expanding the ways in which it delights customers and by becoming the ultimate destination for gamers."

4/ At the time of that statement on January 11, $GME stock was trading at about ~$20 per share.

Since then, the stock has surged to ~$200 per share and captured the public imagination.

But how did it happen?

There are two dynamics at play: a short squeeze and a gamma squeeze.

Piper Alpha was an originally designed as an oil producing rig in the North Sea approximately 120 miles North East of Aberdeen, Scotland. It was a fixed leg platform in water depth of 475 Feet of water. The installation sat close to 275 Feet above water to the top of the derrick.

2) It started production in December 1976 for OPCAL joint venture. OPCAL being Occidental Petroleum Caledonia, Texaco Britain, Thomson PLC, and Texas Petroleum LTD. Occidental was the majority stakeholder at 36.5%

3) Occidental being majority stakeholder took control of technical and operational duties with running and operating the rig. When oil production started in 1976 it started with a flow of 250,000 BBL/day and eventually increasing this amount to 300,000 BBL/day.

4) 300,000 BBL/day would account for approximately 10% of the UK’s oil production at the time, so needless to say it was one of the most important rigs in the area. Any gas that was flowing would be flared or consumed by gas turbine generators

5) Around 1980 there was a decision to convert the rig to also process gas along with the oil. This was a major conversion, and if it would have been scoped in from the beginning, most likely construction of the rig would have been more accommodating for gas.