Patrick Boyle On Finance

Send us a textAccording to Forbes Magazine there are 2,755 billionaires in the world today. The top five industries where they made their money are Finance, Technology, Manufacturing, Retail and Healthcare. It is rare to become a billionaire, but even more unusual to reach that level and then lose everything, but it is not unheard of. Today we’ll look at ten one-time billionaires who later went ba...

Send us a textWhy don’t central bankers care about rising asset prices? For most people their greatest expense is housing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans spend almost 40% of their take home pay on shelter, this might lead you to ask - why aren’t home prices included in measures of inflation? And should they be? Is real inflation much higher than is being reported in the CPI...

Send us a textInsider trading, or the act of buying or selling investments based on nonpublic information, is against the law in the United States and in most countries. At its core, insider trading benefits well connected investors at the expense of the general public and it has been illegal in the US since 1934 – at least for corporate insiders. I made a video a few months ago on the biggest ins...

Send us a textESG (or environmental, social and governance) investing is one of the hottest things in markets right now, with large fund managers competing to be seen to take ESG more seriously than the next. Setting aside any moral judgements, the commercial rationale for the investment management industry is pretty clear: ESG funds have attracted about $350bn over the last two years, almost twic...

Send us a textApostolos Trovias was recently arrested in Peru and charged by the SEC with perpetrating a fraudulent scheme to sell what he called "insider trading tips" on the Dark Web. According to the complaint, Trovias, using the online avatar "TheBull" engaged in a deceptive scheme to sell "insider trading tips" on Dark Web marketplaces like Alpha Bay. The Bull claimed that the information he...

Send us a textLast week Janet Yellen called for rapid action to ensure there is an appropriate US regulatory framework in place for crypto-assets. A month ago the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision said that banks’ exposures to crypto should carry the toughest capital requirements. Todays video looks at what consumer protections are in place for crypto investors today. What regulations protect...

Send us a textToday we are going to discuss the Irish Banking Strike of 1970 when all of the countries clearing banks closed for over six months, only to find themselves quickly replaced by local pubs. We will discuss if something like this could work again, and at the end of the video we will compare how the system that emerged compares to more modern ideas like cryptocurrencies. Between 1966 and...

Send us a textSEC Charges Stable Road SPAC and Space Startup Momentus with Misleading Claims. The SEC announced on Tuesday that it charged blank-check company Stable Road Acquisition Corp (SRAC.O), its sponsor SRC-NI, space exploration company Momentus Inc and two executives for misleading claims over their planned merger. The SEC said the companies and Stable Road Acquisition Company Chief Execut...

Send us a textCompanies across major sectors of the market are reassessing political donations in response to the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol, but it is too soon to know whether it leads to fundamental changes in the way money flows between politics and business. In this video we discuss whether companies should make political donations? Patrick's Books:Statistics For The Trading Floo...

Send us a textDiDi is a Chinese Ride Hailing app that raised $4.4bn in its listing on the New York Stock exchange this Wednesday. This was the biggest Chinese listing in the US since Alibaba listed seven years ago. The stock initially rallied, then two days later news broke that the Chinese regulators are investigating the company. They say they are doing this “in order to maintain national securi...

Send us a textMembers of the leadership team at Lordstown Motors appear to have sold large amounts of company stock just before reports of various troubles at the company became public. Five top Lordstown executives—including president Rich Schmidt, now former chief financial officer Julio Rodriguez, and propulsion head Chuan "John" Vo—sold some of their shares worth a total of more than $8 millio...

Send us a textThe Private Capital Industry Soars Beyond $7 TrillionOver the past twenty years, the number of companies listed on the US stock market has almost halved. The world’s largest, most liquid public equity market would appear to have lost its shine. Institutional investors have been piling into private markets instead, in particular venture capital, private equity and private debt. The Fi...

Send us a textUnprecedented stimulus measures to help the global economy recover from the pandemic are fueling price rises in many major economies. This week we examine whether this is just temporary, or if inflation is back for good. Is this a new era of hyperinflation? Interview With Manoj Pradhan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHf0o...Book by Manoj Pradhan - The Great Demographic Reversal: ht...

Send us a textRobinhood will give retail investors access to IPO shares. Robinhood announced last week that they are building a platform to “democratize” initial public offerings, including their own, that would allow users of its trading app to buy shares alongside Wall Street funds. The move could erode Wall Street’s grip on stock market flotations. It would be easier to implement for Robinhood’...

Send us a textThe top five insider trading scandals. When people hear the term “insider trading,” they think of the crime. But insider trading is just the trading of a public company's securities by people with access to nonpublic or insider information about the company. There are rules around how insiders are allowed trade, forms they must fill out and so on, and these differ around the world. I...

Send us a textI have been a trader for over twenty years, and from the start of my hedge fund career working with Victor Niederhoffer I have taken a quantitative approach to researching and executing trading strategies. A quant trader is a trader that builds statistical models to test trading strategies rather than relying on intuition and experience. Today we will look at the history of Quantitat...

Send us a textTodays podcast is a fun look at probability and statistics. We learn about double yolk eggs, why do they happen, what is the probability of finding one, and if you get one double yolker egg in a carton what is the probability of finding more than one? In probability, two events are independent if the incidence of one event does not affect the probability of the other event. If the in...

Send us a textWe look at the latest research from the good folks ARK Invest and payment company Square titled “Bitcoin is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future”. Are Cathie Wood and Jack Dorsey right about the bitcoin green revolution? The white paper Square and ARK Invest ($ARKK) published this week aims to justify bitcoin’s energy use and explain how it could be the key to a future of clean en...

Send us a textA study by McKinsey found that the average life-span of S&P 500 companies has fallen from 61 years in 1958 to less than 18 years today. McKinsey predict that, by 2027, 75% of the companies currently included in the S&P 500 will have disappeared. So, What happens to these companies? Well, many will be bought- out, merged, and some will even go bankrupt like Lehman Brothers and...

Send us a textTwo months after Reddit day traders took GameStonk ( $GME ) shares to surprising heights in a massive short squeeze, the video game retailer is finally trying to cash in. On Monday, it announced plans to issue up to 3.5 million new shares worth $650m via an “at-the-market” offering, or ATM. The structure allows the issuer to raise cash bit by bit over the course of months or years. T...

Send us a textArchegos Capital: The little-known family office of Bill Hwang convinced almost every big bank to lend enormous sums to it. One of the so-called Tiger Cub veterans of Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management fund, Hwang was, after all, a man who had run into trouble before, having been banned from trading in Hong Kong and fined millions in the US to settle illegal trading charges in 2012....

Send us a textThe Collapse of Greensill CapitalSoftBank-backed Greensill (a fintech company) lent billions of dollars to companies that included the highly indebted metals conglomerate GFG Alliance, silicon valley Construction Technology company Katerra and West Virginia mining company Bluestone Resources. These loans were packaged into bonds which were sold as a fund by Credit Suisse. Greensill w...

Send us a textWhat is the latest free money for Wall Street Hedge Funds? SPAC Arbitrage, which is an investment strategy that seeks to acquire shares or units of a special purpose acquisition company (“SPAC”) at or below its net asset value (“NAV”) in order to generate a return through either:An exit at a premium to NAV once the SPAC announces a business combinationAn exit at NAV, being the IPO pr...

Send us a textThe story I am about to tell you will contradict almost everything I have taught people about risk and return, about how easy it is to make money and about arbitrage in markets. Today I’m going to tell you how an experimental physicist Konstantin Anikeev discovered an infinite money machine and used it to make $310 thousand dollars. In addition he made this money in such a way that t...

Send us a textIn today's Podcast we look at some of the biggest corporate scandals since the turn of the century. They are listed in no particular order - let’s see if there is anything we can learn from them. Patrick's Books:Statistics for The Trading Floor: https://amzn.to/3eerLA0Derivatives For The Trading Floor: https://amzn.to/3cjsyPFCorporate Finance: https://amzn.to/3fn3rvC Patreon Page: ht...