🍋 Credit Sus

Yesterday was a wild one for Credit Suisse, the Swiss bank and questionable bulge bracket down 97% from its all-time highs.

Together With

“It’s interesting that Swiss banks also hide their assets from the Swiss by using offshore bank structuring.” — Julian Assange

Good Morning! It’s been a rough week for banks… but Goldman will reportedly make $100 million after buying up SVB’s bonds last week. And in other SVB news, the bank’s creditors formed a coalition and want the bank to declare bankruptcy.

American regulators threatened to ban TikTok if its Chinese owners don’t sell their stakes.

The new consumer data shows retail sales dropped in February, even as inflation pressures cooled for consumers. And Cathie Wood’s ARK ETF lured $397 million of inflows last Friday, its biggest one-day influx in two years.

Brian Shannon just dropped his new investing book, Maximum Trading Gains With Anchored VWAP, which offers a systematic approach to using AVWAP in a variety of trading situations. Order your copy here.

If you are interested in getting in front of a smart, young audience of business leaders, bankers, investment professionals, policy influencers of over 500,000 people, then fill out this form, we’ll be in touch.

1. Story of the Day: Credit Sus

Yesterday was a wild one for Credit Suisse, the Swiss bank and questionable bulge bracket down 97% from its all-time highs.

Things started to go haywire when Credit Suisse’s largest investor, the Saudi National Bank, said it was tapped out and couldn’t provide any more financial help to the struggling Swiss bank.

Credit Suisse’s shares dropped more than 30% on the news, and dragged the Dow and S&P 500 down with it. Credit Suisse begged the Swiss central bank to come out and support the bank publicly and, on Wednesday afternoon, the Swiss government said they’d help stabilize the bank.

Experts think Credit Suisse’s balance sheet could be even worse than SVB’s. Credit Suisse bought debt at negative yields (rather than the 1.5% SVB did), and took a net loss of $8 billion in 2022 - roughly the size of the bank’s entire market cap. And to make matters worse, this week Credit Suisse found material weaknesses in its 2021 and 2022 financial statements.

Takeaway: Investors are keeping close tabs on the Credit Suisse situation. Some worry that the SVB fallout could spread beyond American regional banks and impact big-time international players like Credit Suisse. Nobody knows what’s coming next, but one economist summed up Credit Suisse as being “too big to fail but too big to be saved.”

2. Markets Rundown

Stocks closed lower over more banking drama.

Movers & Shakers

  • (+) Smartsheet ($SMAR) +18% after the work management software company announced Q4 earnings.

  • (+) SentinelOne ($S) +7% after the cybersecurity company loss less money than analysts expected.

  • (–) Credit Suisse ($CS) -14% after the bank’s largest backer said they won’t provide more financial help.

Private Dealmaking

  • Ryan Reynolds sold Mint Mobile for $1.35 billion to T-Mobile

  • Adept, an AI startup focused on software, automation raised $350 million

  • Arrival, a London EV maker, secured $300 million in equity financing from Westwood Capital

  • QurAlis, a precision medicines developer, raised $88 million

  • Believer Entertainment, a gaming studio, raised $55 million

  • RangeForce, a cybersecurity solutions provider, raised $20 million

Book Drop: Maximum Trading Gains With Anchored VWAP

Unlock the power of the Anchored VWAP and become a more confident trader and investor with 'Maximum Trading Gains with Anchored VWAP.'

This book is the result of decades of research and application by author Brian Shannon, CMT, who shares his proven strategies for making better entries and exits, timing breakouts and breakdowns, and setting stop losses.

With over 145 color charts and case studies, this book offers a systematic approach to using AVWAP in a variety of situations, including IPOs, support and resistance, market direction, short sales, and financial news. Learn to manage risk and work with the market's psychology for consistent profits.

  • Detailed explanations of AVWAP techniques for day traders, swing traders and investors.

  • Strategies to identify trade ideas, how to enter the trade just as momentum begins, AVWAP support and resistance levels, how to manage risk, and take profits.

  • The psychology of your trade setup and risk management. (Includes examples of failed trade setups and how to handle them).

  • Specific strategies for long and short entry and exit of IPOs, short squeeze candidates, breakouts, pullbacks, 4 different types of gaps & more.

  • Gain a better understanding of the cyclical flow of money through assets.

Order your copy today and gain a better understanding of the cyclical flow of money through assets.

Hardcover Available on Amazon. eBook available on Apple Books, Google Play Books and Barnes & Noble.

3. Top Reads

  • Why gas bills are going crazy with no end in sight (WSJ)

  • When did the banking and venture crisis begin (HL)

  • Speculators building $16 billion bearish bet on Europe’s banks (Reuters)

  • US banks shunning crypto firms as regulatory pressures mount (Fox)

  • The economy is performing a high-stakes juggling act (Axios)

  • Are Elon’s Tweets turning car buyers against Tesla? (Vox)

  • The SVB crisis’ parallels to the 1980s (Axios)

  • Goldman cuts GDP forecast because of stress on small banks (CNBC)

  • Fink warns higher rates exposed cracks in financial system (YF)

  • What YouTube hustle gurus are really selling you (Vox)

4. Shortform Book of the Day: The Real Work

Read More Books, Faster - Shortform offers super-detailed guides to 1000+ books in categories like finance, careers, self-improvement, and more. Their comprehensive coverage and deep insights will give you the world's greatest ideas without the fluff.

For decades now, Adam Gopnik has been one of our most beloved writers, a brilliantly perceptive critic of art, food, France, and more.

But recently, he became obsessed by a more fundamental matter, one he had often meditated on in The New Yorker: How do masters learn their miraculous skill, whether it was drawing a museum-ready nude or baking a perfect sourdough loaf?

How could anyone become so good at anything? There seemed to be a fundamental mystery to mastery. Was it possible to unravel it?

In The Real Work―the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick―Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others.

Rejecting self-help bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods. For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking down and building up―of identifying and perfecting the small constituent parts of a skill and the combining them for an overall effect greater than the sum of those parts.

For another, mastery almost always involves intentional imperfection―as in music, where vibrato, a way of not quite landing on the right note, carries maximum expressiveness. Gopnik’s simplest and most invigorating lesson, however, is that we are surrounded by mastery.

Far from rare, mastery is commonplace, if we only know where to look: from the parent who can whip up a professional strudel to the social worker who―in one of the most personally revealing passages Gopnik has ever written―helps him master his own demons.

“The Real Work will help you understand how mastery can happen in your own life―and, significantly, why each of us relentlessly seeks to better ourselves in the first place.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

6. Daily Visual: Award Show Attendance (Somewhat) Bounces Back

Viewers of select award shows (in millions)

Source: Axios

7. Daily Acumen

Bill Ackman on success:

"I’ve always had this view that success is not a straight line up.

If you read the stories of successful people, almost every successful person has had to deal with some degree of hardship, whether that hardship is personal hardship, health-related hardship, or a business issue.

I’ve always had the view that how successful you are is really a function of how you deal with failure.

If you deal with failure well and you persist, you have a high probability of being successful."

8. Job Board

9. Memes of the Day

 

 

 

 

 

Want more Short Squeez?

Become an Insider. You'll get access to:

  1. Industry deep-dives & compelling investment ideas

  2. Wall Street Insider interviews breaking down their investment portfolio, strategy & investment picks

  3. Knowledge Drop - an exclusive alpha-generating newsletter covering the best weekly research & content (podcasts, articles, blogs)

  4. Vault – a collection of investing & recruiting guides, modeling courses, salary / comp data, institutional research (40+ resources added / month)

See you on the Inside.

*****

What'd you think of today's email?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Join the conversation

or to participate.