🍋 Simpenomics Goes Wall St

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Short Squeez
March 30, 2022

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"The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.”  — Warren Buffett

Good Morning! After cupcakes and pizzas went inside vending machines, it was only a matter of time till hamburgers made the move too. RoboBurger has designed a vending machine that will make you a burger with custom toppings in 6 minutes for $6.99. (going to the first one at Newport Centre Mall in Jersey City, y'all need anything?) After losing a fortune on his Herbalife trade in 2018, Bill Ackman has decided to give up the activist life and will focus on quieter, long-term investing approach like his recent investment in Netflix. Chris Rock's slap has turned out to be a blessing in disguise for him. Since he took the blow, he's sold more tickets to his comedy tour in a day than he did all of the past month. Ticket prices are also up 740% (increased from a minimum of $46 to $341). Lesson of the day is if you get slapped on live television make sure you monetize the hell out of it.

If you are looking to get exposure to real estate investing (while the equity/crypto markets keep dipping), check out today's sponsor, LEX, that has created a new way to invest in real estate.

1. Story of the Day: Simpenomics Goes Wall St

Simpenomics is in full focus as adult entertainment site OnlyFans eyes its public market debut.

OnlyFans has held talks with a number of SPACs about a merger to take it public.

The issue? While OnlyFans is crushing fundamentals, investors can't get around its adult content.

OnlyFans tried raising capital last year but failed because of (wait for it) its adult content. In the aftermath, it banned its explicit content to woo turned off investors, only to make a full 180 on the decision after creators and simps threw a major fit.

One of the SPACs that has said no to them is Forest Road Acquisition Corp. II that is led by former Disney execs Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs.

OnlyFans has been on a mission to reposition itself as more of a combination of Patreon and TikTok. It wants to become a place where a broad range of celebrities can connect with their fans. Celebrity users include boxer, Floyd Mayweather and rapper, Cardi B. Apparently athletes are a genre they are seeing a lot of growth in. (Can y'all imagine Tom Brady on OnlyFans promoting his TB12 method?)

Unlike most tech companies OnlyFans is profitable and low key crushing it. It did $1.2 billion in 2021 revenue and $2.5 billion in 2022 revenue, and has paid out creators a total of $3.2 billion, with around 16,000 earning at least $50,000 yearly.

Short Squeez Takeaway: Something tells us that repositioning OnlyFans to a broad creator platform might not work out well for OnlyFans. Adult content is synonymous with OnlyFans and it's hard to imagine anything "professional" happening on the platform. Our advice to OnlyFans is to embrace the simpenomics. Let the simps invest in the platform. (I am sure the web3 community will have a lot ideas for them) Maybe a SimpDAO where the simps can invest and also partake in major decisions for the platform? They'll come around to becoming creators too. Just ask 1 in 5 New Yorkers who are considering starting an OnlyFans to afford living in NYC.

Source: Axios

2. Markets Rundown

Stocks finished higher Tuesday, with the S&P 500 exiting correction territory after a little over a month, as investors turned more bullish on hopes for a ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine. 

Movers & Shakers

  • (+) Nielsen Holdings ($NLSN) +21% following news that a group of private equity investors will acquire the company for $16 billion.

  • (+) Uber ($UBER) +7% as the ride-hailing company is close to a deal to include San Francisco taxis to its app.

  • (–) NortonLifeLock ($NLOK) -4% after Morgan Stanley downgraded the stock to equal-weight, saying it sees “limited catalysts” for the cybersecurity company.

3. Top Reads

  • There's a new Cathie Wood in town (BB)

  • Do you ever feel like a plastic bag? (BB)

  • Premier League grapples with human rights questions after Abramovich sanctions (Axios)

  • How banks react to rising interest rates (Axios)

  • 5 million more job openings than unemployed people in the US (CNBC)

  • Nielsen agrees to $16 billion private equity takeover (Axios)

  • Tesla move shows stock splits are back (WSJ)

  • Pop-up digital ads are taking over the freezer aisle (Axios)

  • The worst part of working from home is now haunting reopened offices (Slate)

A Message from LEX: Can Office Buildings IPO?

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Traditionally, commercial real estate investing has been a lucrative (but not particularly accessible) investment opportunity. Even if you did have the money and accreditation to get involved, the best deals were hard to come by.

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4. Book of the Day: Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking

You make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to how you should invest, and not one of those decisions would be possible without emotion. It has long been said that thinking and feeling are separate and opposing forces in our behavior. But as Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of Subliminal, tells us, extraordinary advances in psychology and neuroscience have proven that emotions are as critical to our well-being as thinking.

How can you connect better with others? How can you make sense of your frustration, fear, and anxiety? What can you do to live a happier life? The answers lie in understanding your emotions. Journeying from the labs of pioneering scientists to real-world scenarios that have flirted with disaster, Mlodinow shows us how our emotions can help, why they sometimes hurt, and what we can learn in both instances.

Using deep insights into our evolution and biology, Mlodinow gives us the tools to understand our emotions better and to maximize their benefits. Told with his characteristic clarity and fascinating stories, Emotional explores the new science of feelings and offers us an essential guide to making the most of one of nature’s greatest gifts.

“With regard to both the physical and the social world, one of the main lessons of neuroscience is that our perception of reality is something we actively construct, not a passive documentation of objective events.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

6. Daily Visual: Top 10 Metro Areas Where Young Women Earn more Than Young Men

Percentage of median annual earnings among full-time, year-round workers under 30 years old

Source: Axios

7. Daily Acumen: Wine

Unless they know the price, people enjoy cheap wine just as much as expensive wine.

Robin Goldstein and his colleagues ran 6,175 blind tests between April 2007 and February 2008 in which 506 participants tasted 523 wines that ranged from $1.65 to $150 per bottle. Approximately 12% of the participants had taken a sommelier course. 

Double-blind testing was performed: neither the person drinking the wine nor the person serving it knew the price. After each taste, participants graded it one of four ways: "Bad," "Okay," "Good," or "Great."

Goldstein found that, on average, people gave cheaper wine higher ratings than more expensive wines. Experts, however, rated expensive wine higher than non-experts. It seems that most people prefer cheap wine to expensive wine, although experts tend to rate expensive wines better than non-experts.

Source: Kent Hendricks

8. Crypto Corner

9. Memes of the Day

 

 

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