Aug 31, 2021 Sign Up

Together With

"The opportunity cost of your time should increase every year."

Good morning!  In one of the OG moves of the year, fast food restaurant, Bojangles is giving its workers nationwide two days off for "rest and refreshment." We are still waiting for Investment Banks to announce a guaranteed weekend off for their under-slept analysts... In any case, four more days to go till the long weekend. (we got this fam)

If you still have not subscribed to Short Squeez yet, now is the time and this is the link. 

1. Story of the Day: PayPal Gets Into Stonks

Just like everyone else these days, PayPal is also feeling investing FOMO. PayPal is exploring a possible stock-trading platform. After rolling out the ability to trade cryptocurrencies last year, the payments giant has been exploring ways to let users trade individual stocks.

PayPal recently hired brokerage industry veteran Rich Hagen, co-founder of TradeKing (bought by Ally Invest) as part of the move. Hagen is now the CEO of a previously unreported division of PayPal called Invest at PayPal, according to his LinkedIn page.

PayPal’s move comes amid a retail trading renaissance. More than 10 million new individual investors have entered the market in the first half of this year, roughly matching last year’s record level. Trading has become a booming business for the companies that offer it. Square, Robinhood and SoFi offer a list of overlapping products and describe the same mission of being a one-stop-shop for finance.

Short Squeez Takeaway: PayPal should have probably gotten into the stock trading business a long time ago when it barely had any competitors. A PayPal stock-trading launch now comes at a competitive time for the fintech industry. PayPal has more than 400 million accounts worldwide so it's definitely well positioned to take some market share away from competitors. 

Source: CNBC

2. Markets Rundown

• US stocks booked fresh closing records on Monday, as stock-market investors piled into technology and consumer discretionary shares.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Globalstar ($GSAT) +64% after a research analyst posited that the satellite services provider could partner with Apple.
• (+) Affirm ($AFRM) +47% after announcing a blockbuster partnership with Amazon.
  
• (–) Zoom Video ($ZM) -10% on slowing growth despite beating earnings.

3. Top Reads

A Message from Daloopa: Automate Your Modeling

Tired of updating models every quarter? The future is here! Daloopa has built AI technology that can build and update models for any public company with flawless accuracy. Daloopa enables a robust audit trail for each document so you can validate the exact location of any particular data point. In addition to saving hundreds of hours, incorporating Daloopa’s technology for modeling needs has saved customers millions of dollars and an average of 8x efficiency gains versus a manual process, while providing a higher accuracy rate due to a reduction in human error.

Get in touch with Daloopa and automate your life.

4. Book of the Day: Liar’s Poker

The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker.

Michael Lewis was fresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush.

Liar’s Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years—a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business. From the frat-boy camaraderie of the forty-first-floor trading room to the killer instinct that made ambitious young men gamble everything on a high-stakes game of bluffing and deception, here is Michael Lewis’s knowing and hilarious insider’s account of an unprecedented era of greed, gluttony, and outrageous fortune.

5. Daily Visual: The World Behind Bars
Prison population per 100,000 of national population

Source: Statista

6.  Daily Acumen: Crab Mentality

Crab mentality is a phenomenon where people react negatively, in terms of their thoughts, statements, or actions, to those who get ahead of them, even though they don’t expect there to be direct benefits to doing so.

For example, crab mentality can cause someone to discourage or sabotage their friend who is starting to do well at school, simply because they’re bitter about struggling with their own studies. 

The name of this phenomenon comes from a story about crabs in a bucket, who fail to escape because they keep pulling back any crab who manages to get to the top.

Source: Effectiviology

7. Memes of the Day

Love Short Squeez? Share it with your friends!