🍋 Instagram Goes Subscription

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Good Morning! Stocks are having a year to forget after a blockbuster 2021. Nasdaq is officially in correction territory 10.7% below its all-time closing high (decline of more than 10% is considered a correction for a stock index). Investors have been dumping tech shares and piling into other assets in anticipation of rising interest rates. In bad news for Better Mortgage employees, CEO Vishal Garg is back in the office after famously laying off 900 employees (in the most savage Zoom call of all time), after he had taken some time off to "reflect and refocus."

If you haven't done so already, please fill out this Wall Street Comp Survey that we are running to give y'all some transparency. We need more data so the intern can get started on his poorly formatted charts, which we'll distribute ASAP.

Today's sponsor, Polymarket, allows you to trade on real-life events including how long the federal mask mandate on planes will last. 

1. Story of the Day: Instagram Goes Subscription

Instagram is getting in on the subscription action. Twitter recently launched a service called “Super Follows” that allows subscribers to pay for premium content from their favorite creators. Creators can charge $2.99, $4.99 or $9.99 a month.

Yesterday, Instagram launched trials of its subscription service in the US on a limited basis. The subscription will apply to exclusive Instagram stories and live sessions. Pricing will range between $0.99 to $99.99. Instagram won’t be collecting any fees from creators until at least 2023.

Instagram has lagged competitors like Snap, YouTube, TikTok to entice creators to join or remain on their platform. All competitors have announced huge investments in the creator economy e.g. in 2021, Snap paid out more than $250 million to more than 12,000 creators through its Snapchat Spotlight programs.

Let’s just say the memes gonna be costing a hell of a lot more money now.

Short Squeez Takeaway: Instagram is losing market share to competitors. Teens particularly are bigger fans of TikTok, where creators can make a lot more money. Adding new features for creators and attracting more teens to its platform are big priorities for Instagram. Otherwise, Instagram could soon become obsolete like its boomer parent (Facebook).

Source: WSJ

2. Markets Rundown

Stocks were down again. Nasdaq is down 8.3% so far in 2022. Bond yields posted their biggest one-day drops in more than a month as investors piled back into government debt.

Movers & Shakers

• (–) SoFi ($SOFI) +14% after the company won long-sought regulatory approval to become a bank.

• (–) Proctor & Gamble ($PG) +3% after it reported earnings topping Wall Street estimates.

• (–) US Bancorp ($USB) -8% after a weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings report.

3. Top Reads

• Do you own stocks in the right country? (ASC)

• Let the market come to you (TRB)

• Swipe right when you see a conference room you like (NYT)

• How I quit prime and survived (NYT)

• For remote workers, the sick day is over (WSJ)

• Why everyone thinks the inflation numbers are wrong (AWCS)

• Don’t get sucked into stock market predictions (Mullooly)

• YouTube shuts down original content group (Variety)

• Netflix should reconsider its aversion to live sports (BB)

A Message from Polymarket: Federal Mask Mandates on Planes

At the end of 2021, Nate Silver, founder and editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight, posed the question of whether there would still be a federal mask requirement in place on domestic flights by November 8th of this year.

Last month, President Biden extended the mask mandate through March 18, 2022. It was the third extension since the mandate was first implemented in February 2021. There’s speculation that the mandate will be extended again due to the strength of the Omicron variant, but it remains to be seen whether that decision will be made.

Will there be a federal mask requirement on US domestic flights on November 8, 2022?

Polymarket traders are currently forecasting a 57% probability the mask mandate will be lifted by November 8. Will it actually happen? Follow the odds now on Polymarket!

4. Book of the Day: Our Final Invention

Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence.

In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI's Holy Grail―human-level intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine.

Through profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs, and groundbreaking AI systems, Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?

“Unlike our intelligence, machine-based superintelligence will not evolve in an ecosystem in which empathy is rewarded and passed on to subsequent generations.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

• Want to stay up to date with the latest travel news and find amazing deals? Check out the Navigator that highlights the news that matters most to help you be more informed on the go. Signup for free today

• The role that luck plays in our success

• The high cost of an easy job

6. Daily Visual: Daily Covid-19 Cases per Million People

Source: Axios

7. Daily Acumen: Never Take a Risk You Do Not Have to Take

The world often looks, and is, like a disorderly place, full of random events. And the irresistible urge to seek patterns can get us into serious trouble when we take this tendency to the field of finance and investing.

As investors, it is important to know that we are dealing with something where randomness and chance can distort the expected outcome in the short term.

Nassim Taleb wrote in Fooled by Randomness –

“…risk-conscious hard work and discipline can lead someone to achieve a comfortable life with a very high probability. Beyond that, it is all randomness: either by taking enormous (and unconscious) risks, or by being extraordinarily lucky. Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance. Time and again it has been proved that majority of stock price changes are nothing more than random jitters in the system for which no explanation is ever required. Yet you can find people obsessing over every movement and explaining it like kids spotting animal shapes in the clouds.”

You don’t have to be one of those. In fact, you just have to do your work, and then let randomness do its own. Like Taleb advises, risk-conscious hard work and discipline can lead you to achieve a comfortable life with a very high probability. If you are trying to seek anything else through your investments in the market, you may be playing with fire.

8. Crypto Corner

• Crypto.com bolsters venture arm to $500M

• The race to dominate the DeFi ecosystem is on

• Bitcoin sags in 2022 under weight of stock selloff and Fed policy

• Coinbase NFT marketplace will enable purchases with Mastercard 

• Lindsay Lohan offering ‘experiential NFTs’ on Superfandom

• Individual ETH miner hits jackpot with $540K block reward

9. Memes of the Day

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