I don't see this widely discussed, but schools seem pretty far behind in math this year. (Pre-calc students are still learning the unit circle in some cases; tests are open-notes and vulnerable to cheating. AP tests were shortened and not implemented well in 2020.)
Families with money are hiring extra academic help... I doubt that the full extent of this will be seen in test scores or college admission statistics for a while yet.
People will say it's unfair, but it was money down the drain for those families. Definitely a complicated issue
Spending $500K on a kid to make her Ivy-Ready and then another $500K for college makes elite education an expensive product... assuming she graduates.
IMO, the product is not worth $1M: something to consider when the outrage over the aforementioned admission stats finally hits.
For some context, competitive fencing costs $20-$40K/year. It's a gamble: the student has to perform very well *and* still have excellent grades and test scores to use this as an Ivy admission tool.
IMO, $500K to get Ivy-Ready is a reasonable estimate!
Leverage constraints are an interesting philosophical problem when they're *partially* relaxed.
That prevents an LTCM-type blow-up but also makes leverage a scarce resource.
Some strategies (industry-neutral equity factors) cost more in leverage-units than others (risk parity).
Short-dated bonds have higher Sharpe ratios but also cost more in leverage per sigma-dollar unit (which also suggests the importance of dimensional analysis for this kind of problem).
Tail hedges become more desirable if they recover leverage and allow it to be re-allocated.
Transaction costs are lower for instruments with more sigma-$ exposure per unit of notional leverage.
Unintended bets (currency exposures in foreign equities) become more expensive to eliminate.
Integrating strategies may have an edge over simple mixing.
Worth re-emphasizing: today's market is only one of many possibilities. Most portfolios are not balanced such that they will perform well in all such scenarios.
Financial advisors, relatives, and media pundits talk about inflation and deflation, but are they positioning their portfolios to do well if those things happen?
Most have only seen one kind of market and are unable/unwilling to think differently. Do your own research!
I might be missing something here, but the roll returns for silver and gold don't suggest that these assets have been heavily shorted, either today or over the past fourteen years.
1/ Exploiting Closed-End Fund Discounts: A Systematic Examination of Alphas (Patro, Piccotti, Wu)
"We estimate CEF expected returns as a function of the history of premiums and current premium. Previous studies understated the value of this information."
2/ "We employ current information to forecast future returns using the parametric model estimated with prior data. By allowing 𝛼𝑖 and 𝛽𝑖 to be freely estimated parameters, we consider valuable information in the premium mean-reversion speeds, which previous studies ignore."
3/ "CEF fund type classifications are obtained from Morningstar.
"In 2011, the mean market value of equity was $370 million for domestic CEFs, $336 million for foreign CEFs, and $140 million for miscellaneous CEFs."
Can WSB control enough capital to create volatility in the commodity and currency markets?
Interesting: I was called a 'geeza' and unfollowed after posting this poll
There is an interesting movement in politics... what something means no longer seems to be tied to what the author but to the reader. (This leads to a statement being labeled as offensive due listeners' perception rather than the speaker's intent.)
1/ The Go-Go Years: The Drama and Crashing Finale of Wall Street's Bullish 60s (John Brooks)
“As a people, we would rather face chaos, making potsfull of short term money, than maintain order and sanity by [turning away new business] and profiting less.”
2/ "Interest rates were at near-record highs, strangling new housing construction and making industrial expansion impractical. The dollar was in trouble, worth many billions more than the national gold hoard. One hundred or more Wall Street brokerage firms were near failure.
3/ "In May 1970, an equally-weighted portfolio was worth half of what it would have been worth at the start of 1969.
"The high flyers that had led the market of 1967 and 1968—conglomerates, computer leasers, far-out electronics companies, franchisers—were precipitously down.