There’s been a barrage of headlines about the growing partnership between Ford (F) and Tesla (TSLA). Today Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley announced that Ford electric vehicle owners will be able to use the more than 12,000 charging stations in the US and Canada.
The two automotive executives announced this on a Twitter Spaces livestream together, with Musk saying he doesn’t “want the Tesla Supercharger network to be like a walled garden,” going further on the call to say that Tesla Superchargers can help the electric vehicle industry “in the same way that maybe Android is helpful to the phone industry as sort of a general standard.”
Shares of Tesla (TSLA) have been rising in recent days, perhaps as news of this partnership began to leak. It’s possible traders are beginning to discount a potential new revenue stream as Tesla collects fees from other automakers to use the Supercharger network:
While some Tesla bulls are reacting gleefully to the news, others aren’t so excited. Many see the wide Tesla Supercharger network as one of Tesla’s significant advantages over the better-established legacy automakers.
Gordon Johnson of GLJ Research said on CNBC earlier today that “now that you can buy a Ford car and have access to Tesla’s network, that literally gets rid of one of the only moats Tesla had left.”
And others see the move as potentially hurting the exclusivity and luxury that Tesla owners enjoy, as @HiddenOG on Twitter remarked:
Everybody except $TSLA owners who will now get to compete with $F owners to charge their cars are rejoicing
Mark Speigal, a noted Tesla permabear, noted that this Supercharger deal could be a psychological aid to give potential buyers of Ford electric vehicles to confidence to buy one:
Funny that the market doesn’t yet realize how bad this $F charger deal is for $TSLA:
The VAST MAJORITY of charging is done @ HOME (so little Supercharger revenue) but “knowing it’s there” will give millions of buyers the comfort to buy a superior electric Ford INSTEAD of a Tesla!
As usual, Ford’s stock price was pretty quiet on the news. It takes a lot to move a boring stock like Ford (F):
With Ford (F) at the bottom of its 2023 range and the potential for any company involved with Tesla to make a massive move, we’re taking a look at a long straddle in Ford stock.
Ford stock currently has an IV Rank of 4.4, meaning implied volatility in Ford options has only been lower 4.4% of the time over the last year. In other words, buying options in Ford is relatively cheap right now.
The muted response in Ford (F) shares following the deal’s announcement leaves open the risk that the options will slowly decay as the stock doesn’t move, but there’s enough tailwinds between the Tesla catalyst, it being at recent support, and the options being historically cheap, that we think it’s worth a swing at the bat.
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AI is bound to change the world and ChatGPT is its “iPhone moment.” Large language models are some of the coolest pieces of technology to hit the market in several years and as such, the stock market is stoked about it.
Unfortunately for traders, there’s not a ton of “pure plays” on AI listed in the markets. When it comes to stable, large-cap stocks, you’re stuck with companies like Microsoft (MSFT) or Nvidia (NVDA) for which AI is just a tiny portion of the underlying business.
For that reason, traders have rushed to buy the smaller pure play stocks like C3.ai (AI), SoundHound AI (SOUN), BigBear.ai (BBAI), and Guardforce AI (GFAI).
We don’t claim to have expertise in any of these stocks. We follow all of them more as trading sardines than companies to be traded based on fundamental changes. Much like crypto, predicting the hype cycle is far more important than the fundamentals behind a specific coin.
Before we get into our list of stocks, lets talk about keeping perspective when a hot new industry pops up.
Keeping Perspective: Echoes of the Dotcom Bubble
The Dotcom Bubble started over 25 years ago with the release of Netscape Navigator, the first mainstream and easy-to-use web browser to enable everyday people to access the world wide web for business, entertainment, or communication purposes.
But while the web quickly became a very important part of business and to a lesser extent, daily life, we didn’t see the revolutionary changes to the broad world for several years.
In terms of pure societal change, the iPhone launch in 2007 as well as broad smartphone and social media adoption in the early 2010s, had a much bigger effect than the release of the web browser. Post-2012 or so, the world around us began to look different in a way that the web browser and desktop-based internet did not do.
The point here is that tech bulls in the 1990s were correct on their view of the web’s significance, but they were wrong on the timeframe which is as bad as being wrong in stock trading.
The vast majority of dotcom companies from the bubble went to zero or were acquired for a fraction of the highs reached during the bubble. However, a small handful of dotcom companies remain juggernauts today like Amazon, Cisco, and Priceline, as well as Yahoo and eBay to a lesser extent.
A Million Little Blodgets
Henry Blodget is one of the poster children of the Dotcom Bubble. He was the Wall Street analyst everyone looked to for the next big stock during the bubble. He wasn’t a programmer or especially well-versed in computing. But the first report he ever published was a buy recommendation on Amazon.com, so people just trusted him. He was in the right place at the right time.
Today there’s a million mini-Blodgets running around on social media, proclaiming themselves AI experts. In the AI hypebeast business, your job is to outdo the next guy. If he says AGI is imminent in the next five years, you say one year. He says one year, you say it’s already here, OpenAI is just keeping it under wraps because they’re afraid.
Like Blodget, these self-proclaimed experts are much better at promoting themselves than legitimate “experts” (we understand the potentially fallacious appeal to authority here) like Stuart Russell who, while they think very deeply about AI safety and the growth of AI, are not making such boisterous claims.
So when the average trader (or any AI-naive person) seeks out information about the sector, they’re far more likely to find these mini-Blodgets than guys like Stuart Russell or Rob Miles.
Let’s end this section with a big fat caveat. The provebial Blodgets could very well turn out correct. But during times of peak hype, its historically been most profitable to bet against hype when it looks like a blow-off top is in the process of forming in a sector, even if there might be months or years of upside still to come.
How the AI Boom is Like the Dotcom Bubble
You can think that AI will radically change the world and the way we do business. A logical conclusion of this belief would be that AI stocks should massively outperform for the next several years. There’s some truth to this.
However, remember that in the dotcom bubble, there were thousands of new internet companies. Think of classic examples like Pets.com and Webvan. Both of these companies had business models that we see in proliferation today, like Chewy.com and Instacart.
You very well could have seen the writing on the wall that, eventually people would be shopping for their pets online and that online grocery delivery could scale. But if you bought Pets or Webvan, you eventually lost all of your money.
So you were technically right, but you both were way too early and bet on the wrong jockey. It’s the same as being wrong.
C3.ai (AI): The Biggest Pure Play Right Now
C3.ai helps companies solve problems with AI. It’s a large platform that offers solutions to several industries. If your company deals has a supply chain, it has a number of tools to use AI to do things like more efficiently manage inventory.
Likewise, it can help intelligence agencies spot threats and patterns in their massive datasets, or help energy companies make their maintenance cycles more efficient. So on and so forth.
Thomas Siebel of Siebel Systems fame is the CEO, a pretty well-respected guy in the enterprise software world.
C3 is by far the best performing and most resilient of these stocks. Take a look at its chart:
SoundHound AI (SOUN): A Play on the Connected Car
SoundHound (SOUN) develops AI voice assistant technology. They basically try to do Siri with more powerful AI models. Right now most of SoundHound’s customers are carmakers, which is an excellent use case for the technology.
While cars with Apple CarPlay and similar infotainment systems already have some semblance of a digital assistant, Siri and Google Assistant leave a lot to be desired. Sure, you can tell Siri to “call John” or ask you to read a text message to you but the utility isn’t that great beyond simple stuff that we’ve had for several years.
Imagine a halfway capable AI voice assistant which you can use to help you prepare for a sales presentation on your commute.
While automotive is the company’s big growth category, counting most of the large OEMs as category, it offers solutions to drive-thru restaurants, smart products (TVs, streaming platforms), customer service, hotels, and a number of other verticals.
SoundHound is a victim of the SPAC boom and bust. The company was acquired by a SPAC in late 2021, but didn’t actually list until 2022 when the bust was well underway. As such, the stock went down in a straight line from its IPO date, temporarily dropping below $1. The stock is off its lows, but still has lots of ground to make up.
Here’s how the stock has fared since the AI boom started. As you can see, its nowhere as resilient as C3.ai.
BigBear.ai (BBAI): Another DeSPAC Zombie
BigBear’s products are a bit more opaque than the rest because of its focus on defense and intelligence companies. Hard to figure out exactly what the company does for this reason. A once-over of the SEC filings tells us that they’re trying to be a bit like a mini Palantir.
This is another deSPAC equity which has also been hit really hard by the death of SPACs. It’s been the target of some activist short selling campaigns for its lack of financial liquidity, promotional nature, and lack of profits. Amazingly, the company did $155M in revenue in 2022 with $121M in losses.
Here’s how the stock has fared in the AI boom.
Guardforce AI (GFAI): Robots as a Service?
We don’t claim to have expertise in any of these stocks. We follow all of them more as trading sardines than companies to be traded based on fundamental changes. Much like crypto, predicting the hype cycle is far more important than the fundamentals behind a specific coin.
Guardforce is a Singapore-based company that offers “robots as a service” that can presumably do things like advertising, automatic disinfection and cleaning, security, and contactless vending and delivery.
It’s a Singapore-based company that just regained compliance with Nasdaq as a result of a 1:40 reverse split, so keep that in mind.
Here’s how the stock has fared throughout the AI boom. Notice that it’s only recently become a benefactor, rising 45% on Friday, March 31.
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Welcome to the first edition of Growth Trader’s M&A wrap up. The plan with this publication is to give a briefing of the significant events that occurred in M&A in the public markets over the last month, go over the most attractive opportunities in merger arbitrage, and generally talk about anything of interest to merger arbitrage.
The State of Merger Arbitrage: March 2023
Merger arbitrage spreads are some of the widest they’ve been under normal circumstances in a long time. All of this is a result of the Biden Administration’s aggressive stance against mergers, it’s their way of reducing the power of big business.
This is a significant departure from recent presidential administrations under Clinton, Bush Jr, Obama, and Trump, who mostly left their antitrust departments to pursue cases based on interpretations of case law and their own discretion.
In this case, the Biden Administration is taking a far more activist role in mergers, not only using the DOJ as a tool, but also government agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Transportation, and so on.
As as result, almost every big deal is getting significant interest from regulators and in most cases, regulator make it their stated goal to kill the deal entirely instead of getting concessions. So it’s very difficult to price out the risk of a deal getting killed because you can’t really base your analysis off existing case law, it’s far more random.
So to compensate for this randomness, deal spreads have widened across the board and have remained this way for a long time.
While this might not be exciting to traditional merger arb funds who are used to picking up meager 5% deal spreads on sure things, it’s one of the most exciting times to be a speculative merger arb trader, as you can structure some asymmetric trades.
Most Active Deals This Month
Microsoft’s (MSFT) Acquisition of Activision-Blizzard (ATVI)
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision is the most significant deal in merger-land today. With Microsoft already a behemoth in gaming with their Xbox platform, owning Activision poses a series threat to Sony and to a lesser extent, Nintendo.
Unsurprisingly, this deal has seen huge antitrust activity, not just from the US, but the UK and EU as well. Regulators are trying to get Microsoft to divest of Call of Duty which seems like an extremely unrealistic demand from regulators, which shows how much regulators are playing hardball with M&A in today’s climate.
Activision’s operations have improved considerably as of late, leading to trader speculation that Activision might seek to force Microsoft to raise its bid by dragging its feet.
Deal Details
Target: Activision-Blizzard (ATVI)
Acquirer: Microsoft (MSFT)
Deal Type: Acquisition
Deal Announcement Date: January 18, 2022
Deal Price: $95.00 (cash)
Deal Value: $68.7 billion
Regulatory Problems: Yes
Estimated Deal Close Date: Q4 2023
Microsoft and Activision-Blizzard News: March Timeline
March 2: EU regulators not expected to demand Microsoft divest of certain Activision assets
March 8: Microsoft proposing package of licensing remedies to guarantee parity between Xbox and PlayStation versions of Call of Duty
March 10: Activision accuses Sony CEO of refusing Call of Duty licensing deal to sabotage the merger
March 14: Microsoft signs long-term Call of Duty licensing deals with Nintendo and Nvidia.
March 17: Microsoft offers remedies to gain EU antitrust approval
March 22: Microsoft says 10 years is sufficient for Sony to develop alternatives to Call of Duty
March 24: UK CMA narrows scope of concern in deal, drops PS5 concerns
March 28: Merger receives Japan approval
March 28: Group of 11 US Congress members urging Biden Administration to investigate Sony for sabotaging deal
JetBlue’s (JBLU) Acquisition of Spirit Airlines (SAVE)
JetBlue is looking to buy Spirit Airlines, an ultra-low cost carrier which operates some similar routes to the airline. JetBlue aims to halt operations and instead absorb the airline’s fleet of aircraft, routes, and other assets into the larger JetBlue entity. The goal here is so that JetBlue can compete with the major airlines like American, United, and Delta.
Regulators take issue with this acquisition because, in their eyes, it reduces competition in the lower cost market for lower income people. Because Spirit will simply become a part of JetBlue, you’d assume that its equivalent flights will increase prices post-merger. JetBlue plans to remove seats and add some amenities to Spirit’s aircraft to make them match JetBlue’s fleet. There’s also worries that JetBlue will stop operating the less profitable and popular routes that Spirit currently operates.
The DOJ is currently suing to halt the deal.
Deal Details:
Target: Spirit Airlines, Inc. (SAVE)
Acquirer: JetBlue Airways (JBLU)
Deal Type: Acquisition
Deal Announcement Date: April 5, 2022
Deal Price: $31.00 (cash)
Deal Value: $7.6 billion
Regulatory Problems: Yes
Estimated Deal Close Date: Q2 2024
JetBlue and Spirit News: March Timeline
March 7: US Department of Justice sues to block JetBlue/Spirit deal on antitrust grounds
March 21: Judge sets October trial for DOJ lawsuit
March 24: US Department of Transportation denies JetBlue exemption request to operate under common ownership, cites DOJ lawsuit
March 31: California, Maryland, New Jersey, and North Carolina sign onto the DOJ lawsuit
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As nearly everyone on earth knows, former President Donald Trump was indicted on charges related to an alleged payoff of Stormy Daniels. While this presents a pile of implications for the United States political climate, elections, and beyond, that’s not what we’re talking about today.
Today the question at hand is what the implications are for the merger between Trump’s company Trump Media & Technology Group (Truth Social) and Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC).
Timeline of the DWAC and Truth Social Merger
Trump was banned from Twitter and several other social media platforms in 2021 following the riots at the US Capitol. As a result, a huge demand for a conservative social platform arose leading to Trump starting Truth Social, which is essentially his version of Twitter.
Capitalizing on the SPAC boom, Trump’s company began the merger process with Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC) for $1.7 billion.
DWAC stock skyrocketed in response and has been on a whirlwind since the announcement, reaching a high of $175 per share and a post-merger low of $12.40:
Let’s go over a brief timeline of the merger:
October 2021: Trump Media & Technology and Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC) agree to merge.
December 2021: Both the SEC and FINRA open investigations into the merger
February 2022: Truth Social launches
June 2022: The SEC expands its investigation into the merger
November 2022: Trump suggests he might run for President in 2024
November 2022: Shareholders agree to an extension of the merger deadline to September 2023.
How Trump’s Indictment Can Halt the DWAC/Truth Social Merger
DWAC’s merger agreement takes pains to make it clear that seemingly whatever happens to Trump, the ownership of the company will not change. Specifically, the agreement has several provisions dictating that a material adverse event will not alter the company’s ownership structure.
The most important being that, according to DWAC’s merger agreement that the ownership structure of the company will not change if “the company principal is personally convicted of a felony criminal offense.”
So, if we take DWAC’s SEC filings at face value, then even New York convicts Trump of crimes, then the merger would be theoretically unaffected.
But worst-case legal documents can quickly change should the criminal probe not go in Trump’s favor.
Because the deal has faced a number of hiccups already, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see regulators ramp up their efforts as they sense their chances of winning in court go up given Trump’s focus on defending criminal charges.
However, Trump’s indictment might not matter a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. Traders have soured on the deal’s prospects, as the stock is down over 85% from highs.
How Traders Are Reacting to Trump’s Indictment
To the surprise of many, shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC) actually soared when the indictment news hit the tape, rising 8% while other conservative-focused plays like Rumble (RUM) and Digital Ally (DGLY) rose in sympathy.
Perhaps traders are betting that the media firestorm around Trump’s indictment will create a surge in traffic on sites like Truth Social and Rumble.
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Regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank (NYSE: SIVB) in the second largest US bank failure in history. The bank held $209 billion in customer deposits, making it the 16th largest bank in the US. Nasdaq halted trading on the stock and most analysts expect the equity to be worth zero. The stock dropped from $267 on Thursday to $39.38 in extended hours trading Friday.
94% of the company’s deposits are not FDIC-insured, meaning that the FDIC is not expected to step in and make customers whole. This means there is a chance these companies can lose some or all of this cash, or potentially wait a very long time to get it back.
Some of the notable publicly-traded companies caught in the Silicon Valley Bank mess
Roblox (NYSE: RBLX) holds about $150 million, or 5% of the company’s cash balance at the bank
Roku (NASDAQ: ROKU) holds about $487 million or 26% of the company’s cash balance at the bank
LendingClub (NYSE: LC) holds about $21 million, or about 2% of its cash balance at the bank
Additionally, there’s a number of companies that haven’t confirmed or denied a relationship with the bank, but are suspected to have some assets at the bank for one reason or another.
How Did Silicon Valley Bank Fail?
Let’s think about the business of a bank first. There’s a classic saying in banking — 3/6/3: borrow money at 3%, lend it at 6%, and be on the golf course by 3 pm. This is an outdated model of how modern banking works, but its illustrative of the core of banking.
Banks borrow short-term money at low rates and lend it out for longer durations at higher rates. The spread between the interest paid on the short-term loans and that received from long-term loans is a bank’s margin.
Finance guys call this concept the net interest margin. It’s basically a measure of how good a bank is at borrowing for cheap and lending at high rates.
This brings us to the idea of a yield curve. Traditional financial theory says that longer-term debt should carry a higher interest rate than shorter-dated debt. Obviously, the longer-term the debt, the higher the risk of nonpayment, inflation, or a change in interest rates is.
To visualize this, we can look at a chart of a yield curve, which just tells you the interest rate for different loan durations. To keep things simple, we’ll use the US Treasury yield curve, which shows the different interest rates offered by different durations of US government bonds.
For instance, below is the US Treasury yield curve in 2005. Makes logical sense, right? The longer the loan, the higher your interest rate will be.
Fast forward to today. Inflation forced the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates. But something interesting happened. Short-term US government bond yields went higher than long-term government bond yields.
In other words, you get a higher interest rate for investing in a shorter-term bond. Intuitively, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. But think about it. If long-term bond yields are lower than short-term yields, maybe the market is telling you something. Maybe bond traders think that in the long-term, interest rates will go back down and only stay at today’s elevated rates in the short-term.
This concept is called yield curve inversion. And all you need to know is that it’s pretty bad for banks. After all, we know that banks make profits by borrowing cheap short-term debt and lending it out long-term for higher interest rates. When the yield curve inverts, short-term debt actually becomes more expensive, making running a bank very difficult.
This brings us back to Silicon Valley Bank. The company was essentially “short” (like short selling a stock) short-term yields, because they were making aggressive short-term loans to startup companies in the Silicon Valley area. In the meantime, they were investing cash they didn’t loan out in long-dated bonds.
But there’s plenty of banks out there that don’t look like they’re on the brink of collapse. Why did this only kill them?
There’s two more primary reasons for the company’s failure.
The first is the company was too aggressive in its lending practices. Banks, at their core, are risk managers. If a bank offers you a 10% interest rate, they think, to simplify, that your annual likelihood of defaulting is lower than 10%. They view it as a good bet. Good bankers try to make loans at a higher rate than a perfectly efficient market would dictate.
Silicon Valley Bank did the opposite. They offered high-risk startups in the tech and biotech spaces tons of loans at interest rates that were simply too low to compensate the bank for the risk they were taking. As many expected, plenty of SVB’s customers defaulted as economic conditions tightened.
But the thing that really kicked the whole bank run off was SVB selling its bonds at a loss. It was a signal to the market that the SVB strategy has failing big time. So depositors took their money out of the bank in fear. Others followed until it gained enough momentum to start an actual run on the bank.
I’m one of those weirdos who has AirPods in his ears 24/7, always screaming, “WHAT’D YOU SAY?” when people try to talk to me. Insufferable, yeah. But it’s a fair tradeoff because I listen to hundreds of hours of audiobooks and podcasts on trading, investing, and finance every year. That sounds like a humble brag, but for real, if you’re doing the dishes, shopping, or working out, you may try to learn while you do it.
Great trading podcasts are pretty hard to find. Plenty of decent podcasts have the same 20 decent guests and talk about risk management, risk/reward, cutting losses, and the same old stuff you read in all the best-seller trading books.
These are necessary, and it’s great to listen to them here and there. Really, there’s nothing wrong with them. But at some point, you’ve heard the same principles thousands of times, and you’re sitting there wondering if anyone has anything new to say.
So I’ve hunted high and low over the last several years and found several podcasts that I hold dearly to my heart. Without further ado, here are the best five trading podcasts.
Why So Many Trading Podcasts Kinda Suck
As a result of my audio snobbery, I’ve learned about ALL of the good finance podcasts. And what’s interesting is that most of the really big ones aren’t that great. You see, once a podcast becomes a “business” (no hate, if you’re into trading, how can you hate on someone trying to make a buck), you HAVE to post a podcast every day/week because you’ve signed deals with sponsors. You’ve hired editors, audio engineers, marketers, etc., who demand payment regardless if you put out an episode.
And sometimes there isn’t a compelling guest to interview, nothing crazy happens in the market, and maybe you just have nothing to say. So you’re forced to rehash the same old basic trading topics like psychology, risk/reward, etc.
I don’t mean to sound cynical. Most of these popular podcasts are fine listens. It’s just that some smaller hosts are more hungry and driven more by a love of trading than business obligations.
Anyways, enough rambling. Let’s get into things.
Chat With Traders
Chat With Traders Podcast Logo
Chat With Traders is the exception to the “big podcasts get boring over time” rule. This interview podcast not only manages to source some of the hardest-to-reach or under-the-radar guests but also gets the most out of those guests.
Aaron Fifield, who started the podcast and has since let Tessa Dao and Ian Cox take the reins (they also do a great job), has this ability to put guests completely at ease. Maybe it’s his laid-back New Zealand vibe, but he can make any guest shine, even the more abrasive guys you wouldn’t expect to interview well.
I think the podcast’s success owes to the fact that it shoots for quality over quantity. You might see one or two new monthly episodes, but they’re always fresh. Recently, the show had Moritz Seibert on, who detailed a very niche arbitrage strategy he used to trade in illiquid European structured products. You just don’t get this stuff from your average podcast.
While my favorite guests tend to be guys that have found an odd niche in the corner of the market, the show has had some very famous guests as well. Names like Blair Hull, Sam Bankman-Fried, Doug Cifu of Virtu, and Ed Thorp come to mind.
The Market Huddle is a laid-back podcast about global macro trading hosted by two Canadian buds, Kevin Muir and Patrick Ceresena. They start the show talking about what beer they’re drinking, speak to a guest for about 40 minutes, and finish the final hour by chatting about what’s happening in markets.
The show has a few fun segments, including “Skin in the Game,” where they make prop bets on market prices. The winner has to buy the other a steak dinner or a case of beer.
Firstly, they are traders. Their time frame tends to be in weeks and months, however. But the stuff they talk about directly applies to even the shortest-term traders. While some shorter-term day traders might not see the immediate value in listening to these guys, it’s a tremendous value add.
As a trader, technical or otherwise, you’re looking for catalysts that will create supply/demand imbalances. In other words, you’re looking for assets with a reason to move. The Market Huddle is constantly highlighting the key market themes driving order flow in markets. For instance, throughout 2021 and 2022, the podcast talked about oil. The supply constraints that stop new production from coming online, the logistical nightmare of Europe sourcing refined oil products outside of Russia, etc.
All of these macro factors trickle down and have dramatic effects on stocks most exposed to those factors.
Plus, they have Harris “Kuppy” Kupperman on every month for “Kuppy’s Corner,” which, in my view, is the best 30-60 minutes in finance content every month. Kuppy’s ability to pinpoint inflection points is uncanny, and his hedge fund’s returns show it.
The Friendly Bear is hosted by a guy who shorts parabolic microcaps. His strategy is super profitable but extremely risky. I’ve seen a lot of guys carried out by the market when trading this way so I give him massive respect because all signs point to him being great at executing this.
What I love about Friendly Bear is that he interviews tons of no-name day traders. Mostly his friends on Twitter, who maybe have a few hundred followers. Very few of these guys have courses, newsletters, or chat rooms to peddle. Frequently they’re anonymous and don’t play the brand-building game.
So you get honest insight from guys who have figured things out independently. For instance, I really enjoyed his interview with a guy named Arius.
Additionally, Friendly Bear will also just interview anyone interesting. I’ve heard him interview a guy who managed a mutual fund during the Go-Go Years in the 1960s. He interviewed a guy to talk about the Chinese Balloons, as well as activist short sellers.
He also does periodic trade reviews, highlighting how these pump-and-dump stocks dilute shareholders.
NO BULL: Market Talk With George Noble Podcast Logo
No Bull is just an excellent podcast format. It starts with one guest with a primary theme to present and often has slides and charts to accompany it. It then moves on to my favorite part, the roundtable.
Very actionable stuff.
The show’s listeners are a tight-knit group with their own insights to share. Each guest might hop on for five minutes and share some insights they see in the market and which trades they’re making.
They also let listeners ask questions. And because the show is hosted on Twitter Spaces, question-askers can actually hop on and have a dialogue with the show.
I don’t have a favorite episode because it’s such a timely format, each episode loses its utility within a few weeks.
Stock Market Stories is a show with a lot of potential, but as of writing, there are only six episodes released since 2019. However, the show recently started producing episodes again in late 2022. Still, it remains to be seen if the show will publish anything in 2023.
The show aims to spotlight traders who make money in out-of-the-mainstream ways. The six guests run an exciting range of disciplines, from a “nihilist” day trader who follows few rules, to a political gambler, to an event-driven hedge fund guy.
I’d love to see the show produce some new episodes soon.
I failed to mention plenty of other great podcasts, so I’ll give them a quick honorable mention.
Flirting With Models: this one is run by a quant named Corey Hoffstein. Always a solid listen.
According To Sources: this one is amazing, run by a great ex-First New York trader Michael Samuels, but hasn’t posted since 2019. Talks about merger arbitrage and the larger M&A world.
RCM Alternatives: this show has on a lot of the big names in the volatility trading social media community. Lots of interesting insights on markets from a different perspective.
