Newsletter #267 Buffet's Exit Trade, Adolescent Music Tastes, Illegal Immigration
When even Buffet is selling, you gotta ask if we are at the top...
Announcements
Peter Thiel on Joe Rogan finally happened! He really wiped the floor with Bill Gates….
Weekly Shoutout
Shoutout to @Sam for being a great startup advisor for Cassandra!
Food for Thought
Went through the 5 stages of grief these past 2 weeks after seeing that Buffet did what might be his largest stock sale ever, right when the Yen Carry trade reversed!!!
What I find kind disturbing is just how high the P/E ratio of the S&P500 is these days
The S&P is also becoming so heavily concentrated, which is something that has been concerning me for a while
Although that might be because in general IPOs are less of a thing and most publicly traded corporations have gone extinct
One indicator I’m trying to pay more attention to to what extent corporate insiders buy their own stock with their personal funds
But I wonder whether that’s because corporations are doing more stock buy-backs so employees can profit from the stock’s appreciation
Crowd Pleasers
Music data shows us just how much our preferences are shaped in adolescence (now do that for porn…)
It also seems pretty clear that defining generational music by decade stopped working after the 90s
Artists themselves are not getting more or less successful — they peak around the same time
Music revenue is also back — it survived piracy!!!
Mind-Benders
It’s hard to get good data on the border crisis, but it’s always been hard: to the extent to which we can use apprehensions as a proxy for illegal immigration, we can start to make data-driven guesses as to where we are at by historical standards
It’s also interesting to see illegal immigration as a function of overall population growth in the US — estimates show that we are nowhere near the 80s….
Overall, I think the biggest eye opening graph is seeing how the “funnel” of illegal border crossings looks like
