April 19, 2021 Sign Up

By Overheard on Wall Street

"If you are working on something that you really care about, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you." –Steve Jobs

Good morning! Last week was one helluva week in crypto world as Coinbase ($COIN) went public and all crypto currencies took off for the moon lead by our favorite coin, the DOGE. If you had put your first stimmy check in Dogecoin (April 2020), you would have had a cool ~$210k right now.

1. Story of the Day: It's a Doge Life

It's a great time to be Dogecoin bag holder – last week the crypto currency went up to $0.47 at one point from $0.06, a 7.8x weekly jump to a $50+ billion market cap (up ~60x for the year). Everyone was trying to get in on the action showcased by Robinhood facing a "major outage" after "unprecedented demand." (Robinhood really gotta fix its issues tho)

Dogecoin was created in 2013 based on the Doge meme (pictured above) to mock Bitcoin. Doge is either no longer a joke or a $50 billion joke. The Doge "pump" can be attributed to the Doge army on Reddit, lead by their Technoking, Elon Musk, who Dweeted again on Thursday: "Doge Barking at the Moon."

Short Squeez Takeaway: Is it a bubble? Dogecoin has a couple of key differences compared to Bitcoin: 1) Its supply is not limited like Bitcoin (21 million coins), and will continue to make new blocks of coins available to mine each year, 2) Dogecoin does not have many mainstream real-world use cases. Despite all of this, money is what people make of it and if the people decide Doge should be valued at $1, it will get there. (Wildcard prediction of the week: Doge to hit $1 on 4/20)

2. Markets Rundown

• April has been a good month to be the S&P 500 Index; on Friday S&P 500 extended its weekly winning streak to four (longest since October) 
• Crypto currencies plunged to records not seen since last week after we all got a little too excited about the Coinbase IPO

Movers & Shakers

• (+) PPG Industries ($PPG) +8% after beating earnings estimates.
• (-) Pinterest ($PINS) -9% on data that some retailers are seeing Pinterest spending decelerating.

3. Top Reads

• Microsoft buys Nuance for $19.7 billion (TechCrunch)
• U.S. is unlikely to ‘just cancel’ J&J Shots, Fauci says (Bloomberg)
• Clubhouse raises Series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz (Bloomberg)
• Ark Funds buy $352 million worth of Coinbase in two days (Bloomberg)
• TikTok turns average joes into Stars. Then what? (WSJ)
• Spotify announces its first hardware device (TechCrunch)
• SPAC wipeout is punishing followers of Chamath Palihapitiya (Bloomberg)
• NFT sales top $2 billion in first quarter, with twice as many buyers as sellers (CNBC)
• "Bad Idea": The response Brian Armstrong got when he first pitched Coinbase (Decrypt)
• What will it take for Bitcoin to be widely considered as 'digital gold'? (Osprey)

4. Book of the Day: Mindset by Carol Dweck

Mindset is a classic by Carol Noweki. Carol eloquently shows and teaches us how we can turn around our lives just by how we think about our talents and abilities. She gives us examples from all walks of life: work, dating, sports and the arts, on how one's mindset can change their destiny.

People with a "fixed mindset" are less likely to be successful than those with a "growth mindset," those who believe that abilities can be developed. We recommend this book for any one looking for motivation after a long year of Covid slump.

5. The Daily Visual: Streaming Wars

Source: WSJ

6. Tip of the Day: The Zoom Interview

The pandemic provided a golden opportunity for any one looking to change jobs. No longer did we have to sneak out of the office for a "doctor's appointment." While Zoom interviews are a job shifter's (read: Millennials) dream, they can go horribly wrong too if we don't take the right precautions.

Here are a few ways to make sure you crush you Zoomerview: 1) Look into the camera when speaking, 2) Find a brightly lit room and wear professional clothes (overdressing is always better than underdressing), 3) Silence ("Do not disturb") your phone and remove any other distractions, 4) Charge your laptop, 5) Sign-in to your meeting 5 minutes before and save yourself the panic of not being able to find the meeting link 30 seconds before start time.

7. Memes of the Day

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