10 Thursday AM Reads
My morning reads:
• It’s Never Been Easier To Beat This Market : Instead of trading against high powered algorithms preying on every market inefficiency 24/7, there’s another path. ( A Teachable Moment )
• A Punishing Housing Market Is Squeezing Renters : Higher mortgage rates and slowing residential construction are again giving landlords the upper hand. ( New York Times ) see also FICO’s monopoly on mortgages is finally loosening . Homebuyers aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit. ( Slate )
• The ‘Buy, Borrow and Die’ Wealth Strategy Has Become a $5 Trillion Market : Rachel Louise Ensign on a Deloitte study of the booming market in loans against stock, to billionaires and the lesser rich alike: borrow against the shares, never sell, let the step-up at death erase the gain. ( Wall Street Journal )
• Home Depot Is Thrust Into Trump’s Crosshairs : A frozen housing market — and a long, complicated history with undocumented workers — has made life for the world’s largest home improvement retailer very complicated. ( Bloomberg )
• One Engineer Trained a 3.8B Parameter LLM from Scratch for $998 : Hugo Vergnes beat GPT-2’s CORE score on rented B200s. The recipe is public, the architecture is documented, and the entire run costs less than a used GPU. Here is exactly how he did it. ( GoPenAI ) see also Post-Noise Notes on the Anthropic S-1 : Anthropic is a bank with a money-losing AI side gig. ( Paul Kedrosky )
• ‘Elonville’: US residents say Musk’s xAI offered to buy homes if they don’t sue over datacenter noise : Real estate agents have been going door to door in Southaven, Mississippi, on behalf of xAI, Musk’s AI company that was folded into the SpaceX entity in February, touting a deal to purchase houses as long as the owners agree to not join a lawsuit against the company over the power plant’s noise. ( The Guardian )
• Ukraine knows the secret to defending Taiwan : Kyiv’s use of unmanned boats shows how low-cost weapons can threaten a stronger navy. Catarina Buchatskiy and Mark Montgomery: in May 2022 Ukrainian engineers turned a fishing boat into a drone. The playbook that followed is the one Taipei needs. ( Washington Post )
• Why We Think We Know More Than We Do : Breaking down the famous “Dunning-Kruger effect” with David Dunning himself ( Nautilus ) see also ‘There’s nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are right’ Michael Faraday onm how blind certainty is human nature’s most dangerous trap ( Times of India )
• Measles is thought of as a childhood illness, but more Pa. adults are getting sick : Two-thirds of measles cases in Pennsylvania have been among adults, a mirror opposite of how measles has typically spread. The state has the worst outbreak in the nation. ( Philadelphia Inquirer )
• The Limits of Trump’s Midterm Trickery : The Trump administration has attempted to undermine the widespread use of mail-in voting; demanded that states hand over voter rolls; threatened to prosecute state and local election officials; refused to rule out the idea of deploying troops or federal agents to polling places; and publicized the dramatic arrests of small numbers of people accused of voting or registering to vote as noncitizens. Many of these efforts have made little headway—either because of the administration’s incompetence, the stubborn lack of factual evidence behind President Trump’s claims of voter fraud, the federal government’s lack of legal authority, or the refusal of courts to go along with Trump’s plans. ( The Atlantic )
Video of the day : How Did Humans Invent Computer? (Neon Rush)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Rich Steinmeier , Chief Executive Officer of LPL Financial Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: LPLA), the largest independent broker-dealer in the country. 32,000 advisors and $2.4 trillion in brokerage and advisory assets. CEO since October 2024.
Among the 20 largest IPOs since 2010, the average max drawdown during the first year was 60%
Source: LinkedIn
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