I figured the alcohol talk in this thread wasn’t gonna happen until after we all lost a bunch of money chasing meme stocks but it’s good to be prepared
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Best margarita recipe in the world:
2 parts mescal
3/4 parts agave nectar
1 large or 2 small fresh-squeezed limes
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Please do not rely on my completely uninformed opinion in this matter.
Mega successful Wall Street friend just texted me: “time to short.”
I think the party is over.
This is going to get lost in the wave of STONK talk, but I’ve got several recommendations. I had to get a quick picture of my bookshelf area to remind myself what I have:
Based on those books, here’s what I’d recommend, in no particular order:
Against the Gods: Just a really good story of the history of statistics and probability, and how they made their way into financial markets.
Inventing Money: I haven’t read this in a long time, but I remember thinking very clearly that this was a better-written story of Long-Term Capital Management than “When Genius Failed”, and I couldn’t understand why “When Genius Failed” got all the hype.
Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader: This is similar to Liar’s Poker, but gets more in depth regarding particular derivatives trades.
The Day the Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of 1929: This book is pretty fascinating, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen many people writing about it. It was written in 1979 and actually covered a lot of the day-to-day activities of people tied into the 1929 crash in the immediate period leading up to the crash. I think I randomly bought this in a used bookstore.
The Worldly Philosophers: A pretty great book giving a superficial history of famous economists. I think this was the book that prompted me to go into academia. Still not sure if I should be grateful or resentful.
Some memoirs that are really good and are effectively finance books:
My Life as a Quant: A memoir by Emmanuel Derman, a physicist-turned-finance quant who spent several years at Goldman Sachs and is now a professor.
Misbehaving: Nobel prize winner Richard Thaler, who some would say is a founder of behavioral economics.
Moving slightly away from pure finance, the autobiographies of Katherine Graham (Washington Post) and Sam Walton (Walmart) are great.
I am an enormous Warren Buffett fanboy, but I’m not sure I could recommend many books about him. Definitely read the annual letters. The big biography The Snowball is a bit of a slog to get through. And many Buffett/Berkshire books are just bad (The Warren Buffett CEO and Dear Mr. Buffett are two that come to mind.)
Charlie Munger is the more interesting personality, I think - Damn Right! is worth reading. Poor Charlie’s Almanack is also very good.
I also want to be clear that I definitely don’t recommend everything on that bookshelf. (There are a bunch of books on there I haven’t even read - my introduction to Amazon in the late 1990s was me just buying an absolute assload of economics-related books as it kept prompting me with “Here are some other books you might like”.) I particular, I see at least one Gladwell book and at least one Taleb book. Don’t read those - they are infuriating.
Some books that should have been great, but weren’t:
Capital Ideas and Market Realities: Option Replication, Investor Behavior, and Stock Market Crashes: This sounds like a fantastic book, right? Focusing on portfolio insurance and how it contributed to the 1987 crash? Terrible.
Risky Business: An Insider’s Account of the Disaster at Lloyd’s of London: Again, this should be a great book, right? No
Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World: One of the greatest financial scandals in history, and this terribly superficial book is what comes out. I have no idea how this is rated 4.5 stars on Amazon.
Finally, this is a curious one: Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street: This book’s claim to fame is that both Warren Buffett and Bill Gates consider it the best business book ever written. The author is a fantastic writer, but the stories just aren’t that interesting imo.
There are a couple of other books whose covers look familiar to me and I think they’re good, but I can’t quite tell what they are. I just snapped a quick picture before my wife went to bed, but maybe I’ll take a closer look tomorrow.
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I can only speak to scotch, nothing else is worth spending more than 10 dollars per jug or whatever they put that swill in. Monkey Shoulder is a very nice vatted malt for about 30 bucks. Glenlivet 12 is a perfectly nice scotch for about 40 bucks. Famous Grouse is a great budget blend that you can actually drink neat in a pinch and is great on ice or in a cocktail.
Sadly everything else in scotch is pretty much over 50 dollars.
LOL.
If you try the free 30 day trial of Robinhood gold, they instantly give you 5k credit while your deposit clears.
WE BACK IN BUSINESS BABY
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Don’t ever lend this person money
I think the hedge funds have other positions than GME.
The high concept for this film is obviously Big Short Joker.
You never name the film that, though. It has to be something original like Edward Diamdondhands.
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When Genius Failed is another good one. About how Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund with a couple Nobel prize winning economists, nearly broke the economy
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Definitely agree that When Genius Failed is good, but…
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Chumps.
A very uninformed stocks chat I’m in just started talking about the Friday date for keeping the squeeze on. GME and AMC.
So GME is still heavily shorted? wtf the greed of these mofos
They aren’t going to cover. They’ll just cover the losses with borrowed money if need be and wait for it to crash back to earth. Someone explain to me why they can’t just wait… because that’s the obvious best move no matter how bad the paper losses get. Until you can’t get short term money to cover it (and your investors do NOT want you to eat this loss) you don’t actually have a real problem.
Good luck getting future hedge fund business as a brokerage if you margin call these guys too hard either.