1/ In 1907, to staunch panic, banks took out a series of ads in newspapers.

Some argued for calm: 2/ Some highlighted the experience of their directors and how long they'd been in business:

CEO of Apollo, Marc Rowan, is one of the shrewdest investors out there. In Sept/Oct, his firm was on the other side of 1/3 of the liquidity supply that stemmed from LDI-related forced selling.

Here's what he had to say on his firm's earnings call today 👇 "Investors have now discovered that everything is correlated to the Fed. And they are also discovering that most, if not all, of last decade's investment acumen was really nothing other than market beta and in some cases, nothing other than levered market beta."

GLG, the world's largest expert network, filed for IPO yesterday.

It has 1 million experts on its books and facilitates calls between them and its 2,700 clients.

Its S-1 highlights the power of aggregation. 👇👇 In the last 12 months, GLG experts were paid $166m.

But clients paid $628m; GLG kept 74% of that.

The best analysts have an informational edge and an organisational edge on top of their analytical skills. Ivy Zelman has all three, as she describes in her book Gimme Shelter.
amzn.to/3j9UOZS Ivy called the top of the housing market and the bottom.

"But while the ultimate victory was sweet, I don’t want to minimize the long and lonely road that got me there. I came across doubters everywhere I went in those days. I’d overhear nasty whispers and mean-spirited jokes."

My former colleague Pete Davies is one of the best investors in the UK.

I learned a lot from him over the years, but he doesn't normally share his wisdom widely. This week he made an exception as a guest on the Money Maze podcast @podcast_maze.

Here are some of the takeaways 👇 1/ On investing:

Pete has an education in philosophy and it shows.

There are a lot of stories you hear when listening to potential investments. The skill is to ask: "What is it that this relies on to be true?"

A Substack milestone: 20,000 subscribers, which is very exciting!

If you're interested, here's how I did it 👇👇👇 Deliver relentlessly. What’s great is you never know what’s going to land. Sometimes you hit publish on something so-so and it flies. Other times, you’re rehearsing your acceptance speech and tumbleweed blows past.

I’ve written every week except holidays for 55 weeks: 170k words

Banks have been complaining a lot recently about unfair competition from big tech in financial services.

Today the BIS addresses the issue.

Short thread (1/8).

https://twitter.com/MarcRuby/status/1346004764623048712

It's true, big tech companies have been pushing more into financial services:

Less than two weeks till the new #FPL season starts and so far 1.82 million players have signed up. Last year 4.56 million players had registered by GW1 so unless there’s a flurry of excitement around the Community Shield, participation in the game may have peaked. That’s obviously good news for those that are in. Except that the winner will probably already have been tinkering for weeks. Last year the winner Adam Levy was among the first 2% of players to register. And all but 7 of the top 50 in @FFScout Hall of Fame were in the first 10%.

“This year, Disney will again become the only studio in history to reap $7bn in worldwide box office receipts… And Disney makes 8 to 10 films a year; some big studios make two dozen.”

Thread on how $DIS is able to make so much $ out of so few films. 1/7

barrons.com/articles/how-b… In 2018 over 800 movies were released in the US but just 15 of them made up 44% of domestic box office receipts. People talk about 80/20 but in cinema in 2018 it was more like 90/10.

To many players of fantasy football #FPL it feels like the game is getting harder. They’re right. It’s due to the *paradox of skill* as explored by @mjmauboussin. Over the past 10yrs the number of players in the game is up from 1.95m to 5.91m. 1/8 With that demand comes an increased supply of information via Twitter, websites & podcasts. Via those resources skill has been democratised. Given that performance is a function of skill & luck, if the variance of skill goes down, then more of the result will stem from luck. 2/8