🍋 No One Wants to Be Vegan

Author

Short Squeez
January 17, 2022

Together With

"Luck consists largely of hanging on by your fingernails until things start to go your way." — Aaron Allston

Good morning! Hope y'all managed to have a better weekend than Djokovic, who got deported from Australia for being unvaccinated and won't be able to defend his Australian Open Championship (which he has won a record 9 times). Inflation has reached Netflix... the standard plan will now cost $15.49/month, up from $13.99. Hedge fund billionaire, Bill Ackman says Fed needs to do more to combat inflation and advocated to increase interest rate by 50bps to "shock and awe" the market, instead of the expected 25 bps raises.

1. Story of the Day: No One Wants to Be Vegan

While everything seems to be going plant-based these days, the number of people going vegan is still lagging expectations in a big way.

Veganuary is a Dry January of sorts. A campaign started in the UK to get people to give up meat and dairy for a month and is in its 3rd year in the US.

~500,000 people have enrolled globally so far. The campaign is run by a UK nonprofit that asks people to forgo meat, fish, cheese, milk, eggs, etc. for a month. They also get a daily email from Veganuary with recipes, meal plans, and other advice. A private Facebook group also serves as a support center.

Popular names in the campaign include Alec Baldwin, Paul McCartney, and NYC's new mayor, Eric Adams.

What’s holding people back? 1) Going vegan sounds fun in theory but turns out it’s actually hard to do in practice. The diet is expensive and hard to stick to food that tastes like rubber. 2) Men in particular are not fans of veganism. A survey shows that 80% of people who adopt the diet are women.

Short Squeez Takeaway: Maintaining a vegan diet will probably get easier in the future as we get more evolved and better-tasting meat alternatives. It might also be helpful for the movement to embrace a less black and white approach to eating meat. Even if one doesn’t go fully vegan, eating more plant-based products is ultimately a net positive for the environment, our health and reduces animal cruelty.

Source: Axios

2. Markets Rundown

Stocks posted a mixed finish Friday after December retail sales showed an unexpected drop and investors digested results from major banks as earnings season got under way.

Movers & Shakers

  • (+) Wells Fargo ($WFC) +4% after reporting better-than-expected quarterly results.

  • (–) JPMorgan Chase ($JPM) -6% after the firm posted its smallest quarterly earnings beat in nearly two years and lowered guidance on companywide returns.

  • (–) Boston Beer ($SAM) -8% after cutting its annual earnings outlook, citing high costs related to supply chain issues and waning growth of its hard seltzer brand Truly.

3. Top Reads

  • Eye care products company Bausch + Lomb files for an IPO. The contacts maker could raise up to $3 billion (Axios)

  • A federal judge ordered "Pharma bro" Martin Shkreli to return $64.6 million in profits. He was also barred from the drug industry for life (AP)

  • Countries face a ‘Wild West’ scramble for covid pills (WP)

  • After getting omicron, people live it up a little (WSJ)

  • Hottest ocean temperatures in history recorded last year (Guardian)

  • Overcoming 5G's tree problem

  • The new trend in healthcare: do-it-yourself (WSJ)

  • Peloton is about to tack on hundreds of dollars in fees to its bike and treadmill (CNBC)

  • One thing covid can’t stop: alcohol sales (BB)

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4. Book of the Day: Good Economics for Hard Times

Figuring out how to deal with today's critical economic problems is perhaps the great challenge of our time. Much greater than space travel or perhaps even the next revolutionary medical breakthrough, what is at stake is the whole idea of the good life as we have known it.

Immigration and inequality, globalization and technological disruption, slowing growth and accelerating climate change--these are sources of great anxiety across the world, from New Delhi and Dakar to Paris and Washington, DC. The resources to address these challenges are there--what we lack are ideas that will help us jump the wall of disagreement and distrust that divides us. If we succeed, history will remember our era with gratitude; if we fail, the potential losses are incalculable.

In this revolutionary book, renowned MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo take on this challenge, building on cutting-edge research in economics explained with lucidity and grace. Original, provocative, and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for an intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world.

“Economics is too important to be left to economists.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

6. Daily Visual: Where it's Cheaper to Own than Rent

Source: Axios

7. Daily Acumen: Bored Investor

Jason Zweig, in an article he wrote in late 2016, mentioned how a bored investor is a dangerous thing (often to himself). He wrote –

“A bored investor is probably more likely to succumb to the whims of other bored investors moving in a herd."

All of this is true for professional as well as individual investors. In his classic book Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?, published in 1940, Fred Schwed wrote: “Your average Wall Streeter, faced with nothing profitable to do, does nothing for only a brief time. Then, suddenly and hysterically, he does something which turns out to be extremely unprofitable. He is not a lazy man."

So, whether you invest for yourself or work with a financial adviser, it’s important to resist the pull of action for action’s sake.

Jason also quoted Charles Ellis, whom he calls Wall Street’s wisest man, as saying…

“Investing is a continuous process too. It isn’t supposed to be interesting…If you go to the stock market because you want excitement, then sooner or later you will lose.”

8. Crypto Corner

9. Memes of the Day

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