A Degenerate Battle Royale Is Shaping Up

Good morning from Madrid. I have a six hour layover before heading to Tenerife for a week of cycling with my buddies.

Tenerife is where the Tour cyclists come to train before the season starts. Many tour riders have a love hate with the island, the volcano and the isolation of the long days of riding.

Before I get to some links and thoughts on the degenerate economy, I can’t not mention the images I have been seeing on Twitter yesterday of the three male Israeli hostages returning home from Hamas/Palestinian captivity.

I can’t imagine the horror and torture.

For 490 days, Hamas obviously tortured and starved Eli Sharabi (as well as Or ad Ohad) . The thing that probably kept Eli alive was that he believed his wife and daughters were alive. Sadly, Hamas knew they had all been murdered along with his brother.

Aviva has a detailed thread on Twitter documenting the day.

Over on Twitter, god forbid Elon and his algo would want these photos and threads to dominate the headlines, so his pal Kanye took to his megaphone of 32 million Twitter followers to spew anti-semitic rhetoric all day. None of Elon’s Silicon Valley and Wall Street bootlickers have anything to say about this because you know, he visited Israel and laughs at his own jokes along with Netanyahu. Oh and the banks bonds are being made whole.

Please do scan Aviva’s timeline linked above of yesterday’s events which are historic in both the evil of Hamas and Palestinians and the Israeli will to just live.

Onward…

As we lose our minds watching the shameless and soulless on display is it any wonder that the degenerate economy continues to explode.

I asked myself the other day here ‘If I Was Being Degenerate Enough’?

I really need to be asking that of the companies I hold in my ‘Degenerate Index’.

Right now it is Robinhood pushing the degenerate envelope. Last week Robinhood launched Superbowl betting and it was immediately a hit.

Luckily for their competitors, the CFTC shut it down. For now there is a limit to the degeneracy.

Robinhood will not roll over here. They own a futures exchange and they are pressing their bets that their 20 million plus active users will love their easy UI for betting on major political events and sports. Robinhood is now live in the UK and Spain as well.

FanDuel ($FLUT) and Draftkings ($DKNG) as well as the countless other sports betting apps dodged a bullet at least short term as Robinhood retreats but they should all be thinking about how to go on the offensive.

I am not sure of all the legal/security issues but Draftkings, FanDuel (et al) may have to enter the brokerage business as trading/betting degeneracy might be a winner take most economy especially with the high costs of customer acquisition. The TAM does seem limitless right now.

One more thing to think about today with respect to the TAM of the degenerate economy. As crypto wallets proliferate from the memecoin/shitcoin grifts happening daily…a next wave of peer to peer betting will explode.

I have gotten a few incredible pitches the last few months and we have some great ideas for inside Stocktwits as well.

Next…

I will leave you with a few links…

Consumer internet investing is back…why it has been so hard since 2014.

Why Financial Data is So Darn Lucrative.

AI is a $200 billion market for data providers.

From the awesome Finchat.io (portfolio company), the ten most impressive charts from the 3,000 companies that reported earnings last week.

Finally…a fun way to stay on top of the weird, silly and degenerate economy from the eyes of millennial traders is to watch Ben and Emil which Stocktwits produces. I’ve knows Ben a long time and he came to pitch me a show idea for a different category this summer. I reverse pitched him on the idea of narrowing their popular weekly YouTube news show to just the markets. The Friday wrap show they do live is hysterical (they have been doing them for a few months) covering every big story of the week in the markets. This week they covered Palantir, Microstrategy, all the grifts and just life as young entertainers trying to make it.

Have a great Sunday.