The Laws of Trading

  • A book about trading isn’t ever actually about trading. It is either:
  • A former trader sharing stories from their glory days, e.g. Liar’s Poker, the exposé that morphed into a how-to guide, or
  • Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed.
  • So starts this engaging review of “The Laws of Trading” – a different take on the endeavour with broader lessons for decision-making in other domains.
  • The book’s author, Lebron, trained and worked as an engineer before switching to a career as a researcher and quant trader at Jane Street.

Collateral Damage

  • There has been a “seismic shift” in global financial markets – “the use of collateral, notably in the form of government securities” becoming “ubiquitous” at the cost of directly assessing borrower cash flow.
  • Pushed along by policy this switch from relationship to transactions banking has resulted in an unprecedented broadening and deepening of financial markets, especially derivatives.
  • Yet, this has also created huge vulnerabilities in financial markets, according to a new BIS article.

Podcast Business and Spotify

  • Podcast advertising leads to pretty good returns for brands.
  • After conducting a study with 250 advertisers and marketers, it says two-thirds (67%) of podcast ad buyers say that every $1 spent on podcasts returns between $4 and $6 for their brands.
  • Yet SPOT is struggling to capture this – why?
  • This blog post covers a lot of reasons. For example:
  • “[What’s] most misunderstood about Spotify is Spotify doesn’t get to monetize all the podcast content that they have. So in the most recent quarterly earnings report, they say that they had 5 million podcasts on their platform, but 99.9% of those podcasts, Spotify does not get to monetize.
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