So while America was forced into a high percentage of unemployment, billionaires in America made 406 billion from their “essential” businesses.

I wonder how much came from the

#irrationalebullience If you want to understand the nature of this asset bubble and the epic capital mis-allocation at it’s heart, look no further than rates. CB’s only tool to push an uber-levered financial system that is highly interconnected through derivatives
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away from it’s natural convergence path towards collapse is to create opposing forces to push it towards divergence. Meaning: force, through financial repression, market participants to rely on price continuation, in a way that makes it self-fulfilling.
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The tool used is rates as it is the basis off of which all other financial assets are priced. Today any buyer of $UST across the curve up to 30Y is guaranteed a loss given reals are negative throughout. So the only hope of escaping this GUARANTEED loss
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is to angle for capital gains, i.e a continuous move downwards in real rates to push for some capital gains in real terms. The longer the financial repression lasts, the further investors are pushed out the maturity and credit risk curves.
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Here are examples to understand what exactly is happening. If an investors buys a 5 Y UST he is guaranteed to lose almost 2% in real terms, so making that up in capital gains is much harder given the v short duration.
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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 ?

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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

If you're new to real estate twitter this is a must-read.

A thread on how most real estate folks structure deals with outside investors.

Most GPs utilize the "preferred equity" structure when they raise money from outside investors. They "syndicate" deals.

Here's the basics:

The person (or team of people) putting the deal together is the "sponsor". Also called general parter. Referred to on twitter as the GP.

They find the property, do all the work, hire the management company and take fees. They often co-sign debt and always secure the financing.

The investor is generally passive, doing no work and putting in cash. This is the "limited partner". Referred to on twitter as the LP.

They don't co-sign debt. They simply read reports and ask the sponsors questions and cash checks every month (if the deal is going well).

There are two equity classes.

"Preferred equity" belongs to the LPs. Cash talks, so this is a higher class of shares. They are first in the "capital stack" behind the debt (bank loan).

"Common equity" belongs to the sponsor. They are generally last in the capital stack.

Sponsors generally co-invest. That means they hold both equity classes. A 10% co-invest is standard.

That means the GP has skin in the game. His 10% co-invest makes him both an LP and a GP.

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.