In August, the volume of personally owned stock sold by corporate executives reached its highest level since 2015, followed by a 10% decline in the S&P500 in September.
Partial lockdowns begin in earnest in Europe and Israel
The global demand for American stocks
Our main discussion: Did corporate insiders perfectly time the market top?
August saw the largest volume of insider selling since 2015, with more than 1000 corporate officers offloading $6.7B in stock. Subsequently, the market has seen a 10% decline since the S&P500 all time high of Sept. 2. What’s more, according to new statistics, insider selling is happening at the fastest pace since 2012.
The question is: What do these executives know that the rest of the market doesn’t?
Corey Hoffstein is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Newfound Research LLC, a quantitative research and investment fund. He is also the host of the “Flirting with Models” podcast.
In it, he examines three popular narratives about what is driving radical swings in markets, including:
The increased role of the Fed
The rise of passive and index investing
The growth of volatility-correlated strategies
He finds that, individually, none could explain the radical market shifts we’ve seen. However, when combined, they create a market incentive loop that is causing markets to move and react to exogenous shocks more quickly and aggressively than ever before.
Where the digital euro fits in Lagarde’s economic integration plans
New stablecoin guidance from the OCC
Mnuchin and Powell head to the Hill
Our main discussion features Marty Bent.
Marty is the author of one of the best known daily bitcoin newsletters, as well as the host of “Tales From The Crypt” podcast. He also is one of the leaders of Great American Mining, a new project using bitcoin mining to make big energy more efficient and profitable.
In this discussion, we talk about how bitcoin and big energy are unlikely allies, how that alliance can bring more bitcoin mining back to America, and how it is working to reduce America’s energy dependence.
The massive leak of suspicious activity reports shows how banks let the government know about likely money laundering, then go right on providing services.
Stocks down, dollar up on COVID-19 resurgence fears
People’s Bank of China says digital yuan needed to fight USD dominance
140,000 have claimed UNI tokens
Judge stops Trump WeChat ban
Nikola founder resigns
Our main discussion: The FinCEN Files
The FinCEN Files are a leaked cache of suspicious activity reports filed by banks with the U.S .Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The more than 2,000 files, representing $2 trillion in transactions, were leaked to BuzzFeed News more than a year ago. BuzzFeed, in turn, shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who then helped distribute them to 108 publications in 88 countries.
This episode provides an overview of the leaks and explains why they show that, despite lots of PR bluster, banks are happy to file their reports and then keep on banking likely money launderers.
This week Kraken Financial became the first crypto company to receive a banking charter under Wyoming's Special Purpose Depository Institution statute. On this Speaking of Bitcoin episode, Join CEO David Kinitsky for a look at what it all means and how it'll work with hosts Adam B. Levine, Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Stephanie Murphy.
In the early days of Bitcoin, there were no rules, or at least none that people understood. The first batch of companies were focused entirely on functionality; Simply making things possible that before crypto had been impossible.
In the aftermath of the collapse of first MTGox and then later TheDAO, it became obvious that rules did apply, or at least would moving forward. But what wasn't very clear was how they'd apply as different regulatory bodies claimed authority in confusing and often conflicting ways.
As law, if not order, came to the industry, much of crypto's first wave of US based exchanges were crushed as they struggled to get legal, a challenging task with different rules and unique compliance burdens for each state and territory they'd operate in. New York famously introduced the Bitlicense, which in the five years since it's introduction has approved just 25 companies to operate in the U.S. financial hub.
On today's show Kraken Financial CEO David Kinitsky joins the discussion of just how much things have changed as Kraken becomes the first crypto company to receive a banking charter under Wyoming's Special Purpose Depository Institution statute. And more importantly, what happens next.
Credits
This episode was edited by Adam B. Levine, with music provided by Jared Rubens.
The highly-anticipated launch of Ethereum 2.0 is expected to have little to no impact on users and decentralized applications (dapps) currently operating on Ethereum. But in the years after its launch, Ethereum developer Danny Ryan expects the upgrade to radically improve network performance and security.
There will be what Ryan calls a “precise point of transition,” where at one block the Ethereum blockchain is progressed and secured through the activity of mining and at the next block it is secured through validating. These two systems of block creation and transaction validation are called proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS), respectively.
The Ethereum 2.0 upgrade is the technology and multi-year roadmap intended to transition the world’s second largest blockchain by market capitalization from PoW to PoS.
There are several security concerns that still need to be addressed by Ethereum developers to ensure that at this point of transition, there is no possibility for 51 percent attacks, block reorganizations, and other edge cases jeopardizing user funds and network data.
To this end, Liz Steininger, CEO of blockchain security company Least Authority, recommends additional audits of Ethereum 2.0 code in preparation for what developers are calling Phase 1.5 of the upgrade roadmap. However, even with multiple audits on top of the ones already completed for the launch of Ethereum 2.0, Steininger foresees inevitable “hiccups and bumps in the road.”
“[Flaws in code] isn’t necessarily a failure but it’s a learning opportunity for everybody in the industry to see how these things work at such a large scale,” said Steininger. “If we can overcome the bumps in the road that are undoubtedly going to happen during this large transition then I think that shows a kind of resiliency to the greater world of what blockchain and cryptocurrency and the development space is capable of.”
Ryan has high hopes that after the “hot swap” from Eth 1.0 to Eth 2.0, users and dapp developers will begin to see noticeable improvements to transaction efficiency and throughput on the merged network immediately.
“We want to increase the layer one capacity of the [Ethereum] system by approximately 100x. The benefits we hope to bring to developers is more capacity, cheaper transactions and a better environment for users to interact with and build dapps on,” said Ryan.
For more information about Ethereum 2.0, you can download the free research report featuring additional developer commentary about the upgrade on the CoinDesk Research Hub.
The CEO of publicly traded MicroStrategy (MSTR) shares why he started to feel like he was “sitting on a 500-lb block of ice” and how he came to bitcoin as a solution.
MicroStrategy made waves when it announced in early August it was moving $500,000,000 in treasury reserves out of cash. At least $250 million were to be moved into bitcoin.
Earlier this week, the company announced its final bitcoin purchases totaled $425 million.
In this conversation with NLW, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor explains:
Why he’s always treated the company with a long time horizon
Why the asset inflation rate is the real inflation rate
How he became convinced that bitcoin is the best treasury asset in the world
Why Michael believes some other companies will follow suit, but better do so quick
Why the intensity of maximalists is actually part of the reason he grew conviction around the asset
A wide-ranging conversation about the state of macro, why central banks can’t really do anything and why private markets are leading the future of money.
