🍋 Peloton Spinning to $0

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Good Morning! Hope y'all had a fantastic weekend. Inflation is the tree that keeps giving and hit another record on Friday. The CPI rose 6.8% in November from a year ago, marking the fastest increase since June 1982, when inflation hit 7.1%. Mark Verstappen won his 1st Formula One title at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix yesterday, overtaking Lewis Hamilton in the final lap, in probably the most epic F1 season of all time.

If you want to invest beyond stocks and crypto, check out today's sponsor Yieldstreet, a marketplace of investment opportunities where you can invest in assets like art, real estate and even luxury cars.

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1. Story of the Day: Peloton Spinning to $0

The post-pandemic hole peloton finds itself in, keeps getting bigger. In the first episode of TV show, Sex and the City's new season ("And Just Like That..."), one of the characters, Mr. Big dies after a 45-minute Peloton class. And just like that, Peloton stock price has fallen 16% since the episode aired and down 75% for the year.

Peloton was aware that its bike would feature in the Sex and The City episode but was unaware a person would literally die on its bike (lmao). HBO, who produced the show, kept it from Peloton due to "confidentiality reasons."

Peloton tried to do damage control and got a doctor involved. Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, a cardiologist and member of the company’s health & wellness advisory council, issued a statement she was saddened by Mr. Big's heart attack but blamed it instead on his extravagant lifestyle – cocktails, cigars, and big steaks. He was apparently at Big risk of dying from a heart attack long before he got on the bike, and if anything riding the Pelton should have delayed his death.

To add to its misery, on Friday Credit Suisse Analyst cut the company's price target by more than half from $112 to $50 and changed the rating from outperform to neutral.

Even SoulCycle did not miss the chance to rub it in.

Looks Peloton did have some sense of humor about the episode after all. They released an ad yesterday evening, featuring Mr. Big coming back from the dead.

Short Squeez Takeaway: Once the darling of the pandemic era, Peloton has fallen from grace fast. Its inability to control the narrative and storytelling around its bikes is probably a bigger concern. Peloton was supposed to be this sexy looking thing from the future, that people couldn't wait to get on and tell their friends about, not a bike that gives you a heart attack. If Peloton can't sell the sexiness, it's just an iPad on a bike and probably even less than the $13 billion it is worth today.

Source: CNBC

2. Markets Rundown

S&P 500 finished at a new closing record on Friday, after CPI beat forecasts. Looks like the markets have already been reflecting the chances of several Fed interest rate hikes in 2022.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Oracle ($ORCL) +16% on the back of better-than-expected quarterly results.

• (+) Costco ($COST) +7% after posting its latest quarterly numbers a day earlier and beating estimates.

• (–) Chewy ($CHWY) -8% after reporting a wider-than-expected quarterly loss.

3. Top Reads

• New York Times launches its own audio app (Axios)

• Elon Musk’s Latest Innovation: Troll Philanthropy (NYT)

• New York’s Met museum to remove Sackler name from exhibits (BBC)

• Football fans spending millions on club crypto-tokens (BBC)

• 49ers plan to buy Leeds United for $530M (FoS)

• Jack in the Box buys Del Taco in $575 million deal (CNBC)

• The era of the celebrity meal (NYT)

• Amazon Web Services explains outage (CNBC)

• KKR Gives Co-CEOs Bae, Nuttall Shot at $1 Billion in Stock (Bloomberg)

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4. Book of the Day: Shorter: Work Better, Smarter and Less

The idea of success embraced by the global economy means being always-on, never missing an opportunity, and outworking your peers. But working ever-longer hours is't sustainable for companies or individuals. Fatigue-induced mistakes, whether in the operating room or factory line, cost companies billions, and overworkh alienates and burns out valuable employees. But what if there is another way?

Shorter tells the story of entrepreneurs and leaders all over the world who have discovered how to shrink the workweek without cutting salaries or sacrificing productivity or revenues. They show that by reducing distractions, eliminating inefficiencies, and creating time for high-quality focus and collaboration, 4-day workweeks can boost recruitment and retention, make leaders more thoughtful and companies more sustainable, and improve work-life balance.

Using design thinking, a business and product development process pioneered in Silicon Valley, futurist and consultant Alex Pang creates a step-by-step guide for readers to redesign their workdays.

“If your work is your self, when you cease to work, you cease to exist.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

• Peter Lazaroff talks with Caleb Silver about the role Investopedia plays in educating individual investors Podcast

• Shane Parrish talks with Paul Rabil about what it takes to reach the top in both sports and business Podcast

• Patrick O'Shaughnessy talks with Philip Rosedale and Bill Gurley about lessons learned from Second Life Podcast

6. Daily Visual: Ark's ETF Assets Have Dwindled

Source: Bloomberg

7. Daily Acumen: Corrosive Emotions

"Corrosive emotions like contempt and disgust, seep into our thoughts over time. To avoid letting these emotions toward a person dictate your actions, here’s what you can do.

Walk in their shoes. At its simplest, this strategy can mean envisioning how someone we hold strong feelings against goes through their day or their life. At its most challenging, this can be like George Orwell who intentionally lived homeless to learn what it felt like before writing his experience in the memoir Down and out in Paris and London. 

The most efficient way to step into someone’s shoes is usually something between the two extremes: long conversations. Stories of a person’s life help us to piece together who they are, what they feel, and why they act the way they do."

Source: Talent Smart

8. Crypto Corner

• 3 reasons why Ethereum price can drop below $3K by the end of 2021 (CoinTelegraph)

• Crypto exchange AscendEX hacked for $78 million in latest swindle (Block)

• Bored Ape #9452 was purchased for 347 ETH (~$1.4million)

• Inside the blockchain developer’s mind: Proof-of-stake blockchain consensus (CoinTelegraph)

• FreeRossDAO makes winning $6M bid for NFT art by Silk Road convict Ulbricht (DeFiant)

9. Memes of the Day

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