1/ A thread on $APY @apyfinance. I believe this could become a major DeFi bluechip, and I’ve been waiting since the 10th Feb for the price to settle before posting this! But it just won’t. So I’ll post it now, but please go slowly if you buy it. It just did a 5x in 2 days!

The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.

A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.

Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible

The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.

Newbie traders after learning F&O, look for paper trading platforms to practise. It's like the itch to swim after you learn swimming but end up in a baby pool. Experience of an adult pool vs a baby pool is different, likewise with the real markets & paper trading 🧵 (1/11)

Agreed, without experience, loading your trading account to the tilt and trading can be disastrous 🌋, but that does not mean you will have to paper trade forever. No matter how much you paper trade, you will never get the experience of trading (2/11)

When I talk about trading, I’m not just talking about experiencing the P&L rush. IMHO, experiencing the P&L and how it can vary in real-time is the last thing. There are multiple other things that you need to get comfortable with before diving into full-fledged trading 🏊‍♂️(3/11)

Stuff like placing limit/market order, GTT, AMO. Practising how SL-L for long & short positions works, trailing stops, figuring how margins work, M2M, T+1, T+2 settlements - the list is endless😩 with several moving parts. No paper trading platform gives you the real deal (4/11)

Here is a hack, though - instead of paper trading, try and place an actual trade on a low-value futures contract. My favourite is USD INR 💱, it costs just under 2K per contract, but gives you the whole trading experience (5/11)

WHY $CCIV CAN TRIPLE SOON.

What is $CCIV ?

CCIV is the fourth SPAC by Michael Klein who already has multiple multi-billion dollar SPAC mergers including $CCC valued at over 19 Billion. CCIV is in TALKS to take @LucidMotors public valuing the merger at over 15 BILLION.

What is LUCID MOTORS?

Lucid Motors is one of the worlds leading EV car "Startups" founded in 2007 in California they were previously known as Atieva. Most of their 1400 employees come from well know car companies such as TESLA and Mazda.

The Lucid motor core team

Peter Rawlinson ( CEO & CTO)

Originally from wales, peter was the Chief Engineer for the TESLA MODEL S. Peter was also the Principal Engineer at @Jaguar Chief Engineer at @lotuscars

Derek Jenkins ( Vice President of Design)

Derek started his journey with 8 years at @Audi working on the Audi A2 & A8 among others. After Audi, he moved to VW where he spent nine years. He is also credited for the design of the CX-5, Mazda6, Mazda3, and the CX-9 among others.

Lucid Air

Lucid Air is the first car by @LucidMotors which is set to release in the summer of this year. Air will have four different variants starting from 69,900 USD which will have up to a 503 MILE RANGE.

Weird feeling. After 10.5 years and roughly £21,000 of debt- I finally paid off the last instalment of my student loan today.

Next month, for the first time- I’ll receive my full post tax salary, for the first time since I graduated.

Sharing as an example of how the system works in practice. In truth I only seriously started paying off the capital in the last few years, when I started to earn a good salary, paying roughly £400 a month off. I suspect many will never significantly eat into the capital.

That’s especially the case for those those under the new regime, who have over £50k of debt. I was lucky in a) lower fees (3k not 9k) and maintenance grant (not loan) still existed.

Indeed IFS forecasts that 83% of students from PST 2012 reforms won’t fully pay back their loan.

Of course those who don’t pay off their fees, the cost will eventually have to be absorbed by the Treasury. Having 17% pay back all and the rest some will still be cheaper for HMT than no loans at all. But we should recognise the a) odd conceit that we have a system of loans...

...which the vast maj will never pay back and that instead b) that graduates are paying in effect a topped up rate of income tax for many, many years.