One of the scariest things about Archegos Capital Management’s fall from grace is there could be others. The only reason we know Bill Hwang’s hedge fund had risk up to its eyeballs using borrowed money is because it got caught out by margin calls.
Arthur Laffer seldom allowed undergraduates into his graduate-level economics classes at the University of Southern California in the early 1980s. Most of the time they weren’t ready for it. Laffer, whose work has influenced Republican presidents for decades, sensed he should make an exception for an ambitious undergrad named Cathie Wood.
As brokerage-app downloads spread, millions of people are getting a taste of stock investing for the first time. Now there’s a push to go a step further, giving armchair traders access to the red hot IPO market. But it’s not clear from the data that everyday investors are missing out on much by not participating in IPOs.
Robinhood, the brokerage that has become a byword for the boom in retail trading, is planning to go public. Like many companies that embark on an initial public offering these days, Robinhood is keeping its registration confidential.
As retail trading booms from Los Angeles to London, there are signs that the latest wave of investors is younger, includes more women, and has attracted more people who aren’t white.
Shares in gas-guzzling car makers from Volkswagen to General Motors are soaring as they talk up their plans for electric vehicles. While they are light years from catching up to the market value of Tesla, the gains suggest growing faith from investors that companies from Detroit to Deutschland can reinvent themselves.
Stripe’s valuation has more than doubled from a year ago to $95 billion, putting the fintech into the upper echelons of the world’s most valuable payment companies.
The US is becoming more of an outlier among countries with a gold-plated AAA credit rating. As its $28 trillion debt burden grows, will the rating companies continue to treat America as an exception?
Corporate executives are talking more than ever about “buy now pay later”—the slick digital lending that is a hit with Gen Z and millennial shoppers. The question is whether it will disrupt the $8 trillion credit card industry, and whether these loans will encourage a new generation to borrow more than they can afford.
With everything from bitcoin to IPOs so perky, many have asked whether a financial bubble is underway. The answer may very well be yes, but with a nuance: Some experts think there are a series of microbubbles gurgling up rather than a single immense boom.
Warren Buffett and Cathie Wood are polar opposites when it comes to investing. The former is a stock-picking legend with a history of skepticism of hyped-up technology concerns, while the latter seemingly can’t get enough of them.
When Gary Gensler’s confirmation hearing takes place today, senators will scrutinize how president Biden’s pick to run the Securities and Exchange Commission would wrestle with the retail trading boom enabled by brokerages like Robinhood. If his book is any indication, Gensler would tell everyday investors that they shouldn’t try to beat the stock market.
What do Tesla, Square, bitcoin, and Shopify have in common? Yes, they are all red hot and bubbly. But they have also been blessed by Cathie Wood, the star stock picker and bespectacled founder of ARK Investment Management. Wood’s “disruptive innovation” fund has posted a 140% gain over the past year, blowing away the 21% gain of the broader US stock market.
The $20 trillion Treasury bond market is getting jittery. The question is what is the Federal Reserve going to do about it?
Several prominent economists think inflation is a growing concern for the US economy. There are signs that investors in the $20 trillion US Treasury market agree with them.
A question that has long bedeviled bitcoin observers is how to value it. Lately the answer to its worth has been whatever influential people like Elon Musk and star stock picker Cathie Wood say it is.
Congress is holding a hearing this week to discuss the GameStop saga, in which an army of retail investors conspired on Reddit’s WallStreetBets channel to take on hedge funds that were betting against the video game retailer. Some say the viral sensation was little more than stock market manipulation. Polls, however, suggest many Americans across the political spectrum were happy to see the little guy take on Wall Street.
When the GameStop saga started blowing up on Reiss Jeram’s phone, the 18-year-old actor was shocked by the video game seller’s skyrocketing share price. Then the Londoner was intrigued by what seemed to be an army of retail traders taking a principled stand against Wall Street.
Shares of Robinhood jumped 50% in January despite the GameStop controversy, as investors scramble to get a piece of the brokerage before a much anticipated IPO this year. The fintech’s growing valuation is another sign that investors think the trading app is bulletproof to everything from handwringing over its business model to technology outages and fines.
Bitcoin soared to a record high after Tesla said in a filing that it had invested $1.5 billion in the crypto asset. The $800 billion electric company also said it would start accepting bitcoin as a form of payment soon. In at least one way, Tesla and bitcoin seem made for each other: They are two of the most effervescent assets in the retail trading boom.
In the US stock market, many of the most important places for matching buyers and sellers are now large trading firms. Taken together, two of the mightiest—Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial—account for more of the overall equity market than the New York Stock Exchange.
Robinhood has long capitalized on the belief that the little guy gets screwed by Wall Street. Now that story has boomeranged on the eight-year-old brokerage.