🍋 Goodbye 9-5

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Good morning! Hope y'all had a great weekend. Median pay rose to $14.2 million for heads of S&P 500 companies, from $13.4 million last year. Chad Richison, last year's highest paid S&P 500 CEO, actually took a hit, from $211 million to $3 million this year. (oof) A 60-year old German is also taking a lot of hits and has allegedly gotten vaccinated 90 times so that he could sell forged vax cards to folks who didn't want to get the shot. Employers have found a new way to combat labor shortage and are shortening background checks from 7 years to 1 year. 

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Have you ever wondered what the top-minds of Wall Street are investing in?

Or maybe… What their portfolio structure looks like? Their take on the current state of the market? How they advance in their career, get promotions, and raises?

Good news - this is your chance to discover all of that (and more)!

Today we’re announcing the launch of our premium membership: Short Squeez Insiders

Each week we’ll be interviewing Wall Street’s finest. Breaking down their investment portfolio, strategy, and evaluating their top stock and crypto picks.

The goal is to let you be a fly on the wall while they reveal everything about their investments and career that’s normally kept secret. 

Besides our Insiders newsletter: You’ll also get access to:

1. Access to Short Squeez Vault, a premium collection of resources including investing, recruiting and compensation guides, modeling courses, institutional research, e-books and full archive since day 1

2. Our private community with access to Short Squeez founding team, investment and networking opportunities

3. Referrals and recruiting help for firms from Wall Street to Silicon Valley including investment banking, private equity, venture capital, hedge funds and big tech firms

The first 250 people to join before Tuesday, April 12 will get 40% off for 6 months.

Sign up here.

See you on the inside!

1. Story of the Day: Goodbye 9-5

The 9 to 5 routine that is commonplace around the world might be becoming a thing of the past. COVID not only transformed where we work, but also when we work.

Research shows that roughly half of workers are night owls. This isn't a choice really, but is actually a result of genetics. Thanks to WFH, these people are living their best lives, able to work and sleep later. 

Around the globe, 76% of companies have instituted hybrid work models, making it easier for employees to work from wherever, whenever. A Microsoft Work Trends report showed that people are logging on at breakfast and past happy hour time.

The National Institute of Health says that for most adults, natural bed time based off their genetics and chronotypes is past midnight. Some famous night owls like Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai, get a second wind around 9 pm and is most productive after 10. Author Michael Lewis said his ideal writing hours are between 7 pm and 4 am, when there's peace and quiet. Singer Christina Aguilera said, "If it were up to me, my favorite time to work would be between 3 to 4 am.

Short Squeez Takeaway: Apologies to all the 1st year analysts reading this and thinking, "nice... I've been working through the night ever since I hit the desk." The 9-5 is more like a 9-2am for much of the junior staff at investment banks and doesn't look like that is changing any time soon. It's not all depression tho, WFH has made mindless scrolling, mid-Zoom naps and Peloton workouts much easier. (it ain't much but it's something)

Source: Axios

2. Markets Rundown

All markets were slightly up to close out a largely flat week. Equities started Q2 with a tiny uptick after their first quarterly decline in two years.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Greenidge Generation Holdings ($GREE) +34% as the crypto mining company announced positive Q4 results, and said crypto datacenter revenue increased to $33.7 million.

• (+) Clovis Oncology ($CLVS) +24% on positive results from their trial of ovarian cancer drug.

• (–) Embecta Corp ($EMBC) -8% after BD (Becton, Dickinson and Co) a global medical tech company announced it completed its spinoff of Embecta.

3. Top Reads

• In a risky world, stocks still look like the "least-bad" play (BB)

• Reality sets in for ultra-fast grocery delivery (Axios)

• Swatch X Omega collab brings sneaker style hype to watch world (BB)

• Automation could make long-haul truck drivers obsolete (Axios)

• Apple gearing up to let you subscribe to iPhones (BB)

• A different dysfunction at homes, or in the housing market rather (Axios)

• Ron Klain says White House sees "encouraging signs" economy is rebounding (Axios)

• A harsh lesson in bond math in Q1 (WSJ)

• March major asset class performance review (CS)

A Message from Composer

How did this tight-lipped hedge fund return 66% per year?

If you invested $10,000 in Renaissance Technologies’ Medallion in 1988, you’d cash out in 2018 with a cool $200,000,000. 

Their secret sauce? 

Instead of hiring slick-talking Wall Street suits, Medallion is run by an army of big-brained computer scientists, mathematicians, and neural engineers that specialize in “quantitative trading.” 

Quant trading relies on sophisticated algorithms to buy and sell securities - pulling out all human emotion. Just take a look at the fund's 3 best years…

• 2000 (Dot-Com Crash): +99%

• 2008 (Great Financial Crisis): +82%

• 2020 (Covid): +76%

But unless you are a PHD-wielding, Python-coding, Excel-Wizard…quant-trading has been out of reach. 

Until now…

Composer gives you the financial firepower to easily drag, drop, edit and swap quant-investing strategies from scratch - no engineering degree required. 

Think of Composer as the final soul-stone in your investing gauntlet - with one snap, your ability to (potentially) outperform the market is…inevitable.

So stop investing with your gut and harness the power-of quant trading with today.*

4. Book of the Day: Expectations Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns

Most investment books try to assess the attractiveness of a stock price by estimating the value of the company. Expectations Investing provides a powerful and insightful alternative to identifying gaps between price and value.

Michael J. Mauboussin and Alfred Rappaport suggest that an investor start with a known quantity, the stock price, and ask what it implies for future financial results. After showing how to read expectations, Mauboussin and Rappaport provide a guide to rigorous strategic and financial analysis to help investors assess the likelihood of revisions to these expectations. Their framework traces value creation from the triggers that shape a company’s performance to the impact on the value drivers. This allows a practitioner of expectations investing to determine whether a stock is an attractive buy or sell candidate.

Investors who read this book will be able to evaluate stocks of companies in any sector or geography more effectively than those who use the standard approaches of most investors. Managers can use the book’s principles to devise, adjust, and communicate their company’s strategy in light of shareholder expectations.

“Stock prices are the clearest and most reliable signal of the market’s expectations about a company’s future financial performance.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

• Gemini – the one stop shop for all your crypto needs. Buy, sell, store, and earn bitcoin, ether, and over 70+ other cryptocurrencies with Gemini. You can also earn up to 8.05% APY on your cryptocurrency portfolio every day. Use code WALLST20 and get $20 of bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within 30 days

• Why so many middle aged women are on antidepressants

• Chatbots are getting smarter, and nicer!

• LinkedIn FOMO for college students is real, here are some tips

6. Daily Visual: Unemployment Improvement

Sectors with most improvement in unemployment rate, March 2021 to 2022

Source: Axios

7. Daily Acumen: Lessons From Joseph Wells

Sometimes getting what you want is as simple as asking for it. Closed mouths don’t get fed.

Money spent on books is money well spent. Even if you only read some, you're getting more knowledge and entertainment than you're paying for.

Get comfortable sitting alone in silence. It’s something you'll need to practice. Put away your phone, pour a cup of coffee, and sit in a quiet place. Turn off the radio on your next long car ride. Allow yourself to be alone with your thoughts.

Make a habit of forming habits. They are the building blocks of the person you want to become. The best way to build a habit is to start smaller than you think you can accomplish, then work up.

Seek advice from everyone, but filter it to fit your life. The purpose of asking for advice is to gain as much perspective as possible then make your own decision with that perspective, not to get someone else to make your decision for you.

There's value in sticking with one job for a long period of time—you'll get really good at it, your confidence will increase, you'll become specialized which is rewarded financially if it's in the right area. But there's also value in jumping around—bigger salary increases, bigger network, potentially broader base of skills, more unique experiences. Neither way is wrong, you just have to be clear with yourself about what you want.

Source: Joseph Wells

8. Crypto Corner

• Could Bitcoin breakout be a fakeout?

• Tesla crypto tokens rise

• Short sellers bet that Tether, crypto's central bank, is vulnerable to a run

• DAO to sell NFTs for the right to tweet

• European parliament passes bill requiring crypto firms to KYC non-custodial wallets

• Australian crypto "finfluencers" facing tough new legal restrictions

9. Memes of the Day

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*Investing in securities involves risks, including the risk of loss. Composer Technologies Inc., SEC Registered RIA. All charts and symbols are provided for illustrative purposes only and are not intended as recommendations to purchase or sell any security and do not reflect actual market conditions, stock performance, or AI decisions.