🍋 Guy She Tells You Not to Worry About

Together With

"When you have a lot of talent, you don't necessarily have to be gracious and consider everyone." – Tyler Winklevoss

Happy Friday! We are officially in a "Kangaroo Market" with the wild up and down fluctuations in stocks over the last two weeks (watch out for the inflation report today). New Zealand has decided to ban smoking for future generations and anyone who was born after 2008 will never be able to smoke in their life time. In weird collab of the day, Oreo is partnering with Barefoot wines, to make the Barefoot X Oreo Thins wine, which is made with flavors that are either inspired by or are meant to compliment Oreos. NYC is going full NYC and has approved a bill which will let its more than 800,000 residents who aren't US citizens vote in municipal elections.

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1. Story of the Day: Guy She Tells You Not to Worry About

Ken Griffin had a rough start to the new year after the WallStreetBets mob brought down Melvin Capital, whom he was heavily invested in. Then Robinhood shutoff trading and Uncle Ken was accused of pulling the strings by pressuring Robinhood to curb retail investor trading to stop his losses in Melvin Capital.

Then came a class-action lawsuit from retail investors in September. #KenGriffinLied was a top trend on Twitter for many days. The tweets triggered Uncle Ken, who took over the firm's Twitter account and fired cryptic tweets rejecting "Internet conspiracies and Twitter mobs." 

Ken Griffin had had enough. Then came around his opportunity – the US Constitution was up for sale. 17,000 people had come together to form the ConstitutionDAO, and raised $40 million in a matter of days to buy the Constitution. There was going to be no better show of democracy than a group of people coming together to buy the constitution then putting it on display for free.

Ken Griffin had other ideas tho, he couldn't let the poors win this time. "I told myself, 'I am going to own this, I don’t do that very often," said Uncle Ken.

He outbid the ConstitutionDAO and bought the Constitution for $43.2 million, a significant premium to presale estimated price of $15 to $20 million.

To rub it in the poors' faces, Ken Griffin recently explained why he bought the Constitution: "I was sitting at home in New York and my son calls me to say, ‘Dad, you have to buy the Constitution." 

Ken Griffin is officially the Guy She Tells You Not to Worry About.

Short Squeez Takeaway: Lesson of the day is not to mess with Ken Griffin. He doesn't care if you are the SEC or Keith Gill making investing videos on YouTube. "It's important for me to be No. 1," he says proudly, and he will spend any amount of his $22 billion net worth to come after you.

Source: Bloomberg

2. Markets Rundown

  • Stocks ended lower yesterday, Nasdaq had its worst day in a week, ahead of tomorrow's inflation report which could rip up the market again.

Movers & Shakers

  • (+) EVgo ($EVGO) 6% after JPMorgan initiated coverage of the EV fast-charging service operator with an overweight rating.

  • (+) Restoration Hardware ($RH) 5% after reporting blockbuster earnings that beat forecasts.

  • (–) Lucid Group ($LCID) -18% after announcing a proposed $1.75 billion convertible senior notes offering.

3. Top Reads

  • Google execs tell employees they won’t raise pay companywide to match inflation (CNBC)

  • Casper: An Autopsy (BelowTheLine)

  • Can Apple take down the world’s most notorious spyware company? (Verge)

  • When making music breaks your body (NPR)

  • Popular family safety app Life360 is selling precise location data on its tens of millions of users (Markup)

  • You should be afraid of the next ‘lab leak’ (NYT)

  • Why are staffing firms hiring people to sit around and do nothing? (Verge)

  • Netflix launches new website (HR)

  • CVS CEO Karen Lynch says smash-and-grab robberies fueled by online marketplaces (CNBC)

A Message from FWIW: In 2 Years ESG Investing has Grown 10x

Investments with a sustainability, ESG, and socially conscious focus are booming. Investors are realizing they don't just have to settle for a financial return — they can demand that their money also help create the world they want. 

  • Why this matters: This isn't just a "do-gooder" trend — the biggest banks, insurance companies, and major investors are turning to ESG stocks to guard against investment risk. And there's no reason you shouldn't consider following their lead.

Want to learn how to get in on this growing market in just 5 minutes a week? Sign up and read For What It's Worth (FWIW), a free weekly newsletter that delivers socially responsible investing news, tools, and resources in a way that's informative, easy to read, and cuts out all the jargon, just like you get here at Short Squeez.

Don't miss out — sign up for the FWIW newsletter today.

4. Book of the Day: Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

In 2009, a chubby, mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business named Jho Low set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude--one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system. 

Over a decade, Low, with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, siphoned billions of dollars from an investment fund--right under the nose of global financial industry watchdogs. Low used the money to finance elections, purchase luxury real estate, throw champagne-drenched parties, and even to finance Hollywood films like The Wolf of Wall Street.

By early 2019, with his yacht and private jet reportedly seized by authorities and facing criminal charges in Malaysia and in the United States, Low had become an international fugitive, even as the U.S. Department of Justice continued its investigation.

“Between October 2009 and June 2010—a period of only eight months—Low and his entourage spent $85 million on alcohol, gambling in Vegas, private jets, renting superyachts, and to pay Playmates and Hollywood celebrities to hang out with them.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

6. Daily Visual: Most Instagrammed World Heritage Sites

Unesco World Heritage sites most tagged on Instagram in 2021 (in millions)

Source: Statista

7. Daily Acumen: Fortune 50

For a fifth consecutive year, Fortune magazine has teamed up with management consulting firm BCG to produce the Future 50. The index is based on a system that analyzes dozens of factors to identify companies built for robust growth and outsize market returns. The index is based on two pillars: a top-down, market-based assessment of a company’s potential, and a bottom-up analysis of its capacity to deliver growth. Here’s the top 10 companies.

1.     CrowdStrike - cybersecurity technology company that provides cloud workload and endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services

2.     Twilio - cloud communications platform that allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and perform other communication functions using its web service APIs

3.     Datadog - observability service for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services, through a SaaS-based data analytics platform

4.     Block - financial services and digital payments company recently renamed from Square

5.     Airbnb - operates an online marketplace for lodging, primarily homestays for vacation rentals and tourism activities

6.     Moderna - pharmaceutical and biotechnology company that focuses on RNA therapeutics, primarily mRNA vaccines

7.     JD Health - the largest online healthcare platform in China

8.     DocuSign - allows organizations to manage electronic agreements

9.     MercadoLibre - Argentine company that operates online marketplaces dedicated to e-commerce and online auctions

10.  Beijing Kingsoft Office - China-based company mainly engaged in the design, research and development and sales promotion of software products and services

Source: Fortune

8. Crypto Corner

  •  Meta's crypto wallet Novi launches on WhatsApp (Block)

  • Data shows pro traders are currently more bullish on Ethereum than Bitcoin (CoinTelegraph)

  • Half a Billion in Bitcoin, Lost in the Dump (NewYorker)

  • Palm NFT Studio raises $27 million in Series B led by Microsoft's M12 (CoinTelegraph)

  • A rare CryptoPunk has sold at a record $10.2 million (Block)

9. Memes of the Day

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