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🍋 Cybercrime Writer's $4.5 Billion Cybercrime

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Short Squeez
February 09, 2022

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"I've lost tremendous amounts of money in various markets and I think that that's something that makes me better at my job, not worse." — Jim Cramer

Good morning! Peloton is going full Vishal Garg and fired 2,800 employees... then gave them a year-long Peloton membership as part of the severance package. Controversy surrounding Joe Rogan won't lead to him being kicked off the platform, but instead $100 million being invested into underrepresented creators. University of California has agreed to pay $244 million to settle allegations that hundreds of women were sexually abused by a former UCLA gynecologist. Inflation has made its way to electricity bills with many New Yorkers complaining that their ConEd bills have unexpectedly doubled. 

If you are looking for a browser 3 times faster than Chrome, check out today's sponsor, Brave, which includes the first secure crypto wallet built natively in a web3 browser. 

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1. Story of the Day: Cybercrime Writer's $4.5 Billion Cybercrime

US Justice Department has seized $3.6 billion worth of bitcoin stolen in its largest financial seizure ever. Two people have been arrested: Ilya Lichtenstein, 34 years old, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31, who writes for Forbes about detecting cybercrime.

The bitcoin was stolen in 2016 and sent to a digital wallet controlled by Ilya. At the time the bitcoin was worth $71 million but now the amount has ballooned to $4.5 billion, of which $3.6 billion was recovered.

While Ilya maintained a tamer “tech entrepreneur” persona, wife Heather was a woman of many talents (including fraud). Heather called herself “The Crocodile of Wall Street” and “Razzlekhan,” an artist specializing in collage, sculpture, painting and fashion design.

The Crocodile of Wall Street rapped about investment strategies and called herself a risk-loving moneymaker who was “sly as a gator.”

She's an avid TikTok-er as well. In one of the videos she rapped about investing in meme stocks: “My tendies going global / Bitcoin, Ethereum HODL!” 

Heather also gave a Ted Talk in Williamsburg Hotel titled “How to Social Engineer Your Way Into Anything,” which she defined as “the act of manipulating someone into divulging information or taking a particular action.”

The presentation ended with a slide: “How Can You Socially Engineer Yourself OUT of a Bad Situation?” Above the line was an image of two cuffed hands behind bars. Karma is a b*tch.

Short Squeez Takeaway: The world of crypto hacks really be strange af. We had the hacker who returned his hard-earned hacked money, then got a job offer from the company he hacked. Now we’ve got a TikTok rapper posting cringey videos, giving talks on deceit, writing about cybercrime while casually stealing bitcoin worth more than the GDP of Aruba. Next up we gon’ get a 8 year old hacker who steals all 21 million bitcoin.

Source: Bloomberg, WSJ

2. Markets Rundown

Markets rose after more earnings were announced, but only slightly as investors wait for inflation data to come this week.

Movers & Shakers

  • (+) Amgen ($AMGN) +8% after the company shared positive guidance for all the way out to 2030.

  • (+) NortonLifeLock ($NLOK) +6% hitting a new 52 week high and outperforming competitors.

  • (–) Fiserv ($FISV) -6% despite beating Q4 estimates, possibly because of higher expenses and fewer acquisition related intangible assets than the previous year.

3. Top Reads

  • Fast food favorite Chipotle shares rose on better than expected earnings. Because they can charge whatever they want for guac (CNBC)

  • Stocks retail investors favor unfortunately have more crash risk (EI)

  • Aww! The Fed actually does care about the stock market! (AA)

  • Very few trust Facebook, and their recent dip could help them avoid antitrust issues (CNBC)

  • Have y'all stopped using Lyft? (CNBC)

  • Taking a look back, Apple probably won't buy Peloton (CNBC)

  • Female led companies are more likely to be targeted by activist investors (WSJ)

  • Bumble makes its first move! Acquisition move that is, buying French dating app Fruits (Reuters)

  • UK asst manager Abrdn had to pause a shareholder vote for an acquisition because of a paper shortage. Who even uses paper anymore? (FT)

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4. Book of the Day: Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

During the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more fair and more and m prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled.

The clock was turned back on a century of economic progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market all-powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, lifting up an oligarchy that served only its own interests, and leaving the huge majority of Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope.

Why and how did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt Andersen offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America’s undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame—to the radical right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal “useful idiots,” among whom he includes himself.

Only a writer with Andersen’s crackling energy, deep insight, and ability to connect disparate dots and see complex systems with clarity could make such a book both intellectually formidable and vastly entertaining. And only a writer of Andersen’s vision could reckon with our current high-stakes inflection point, and show the way out of this man-made disaster.

“According to the health-efficiency index compiled by Bloomberg News, which combines longevity and healthcare spending into a single metric for almost every country, the United States is second from the bottom, better only than Bulgaria.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

  • According to Airbnb, Demand > Supply. Secure your stake in this $1.2 Trillion market with reAlpha

  • Excerpt from "Better Than Alpha: Three steps to capturing excess returns in a changing world"

  • An interview with "Deep Work" author Cal Newport

6. Daily Visual: Return to Labor Force by Gender

Source: Axios

7. Daily Acumen: Minimize mistakes due to behavioral biases

Successful investing is 1% about what you know and what you buy, and 99% about how you behave. But then, we humans are not wired to behave well, especially in areas of uncertainty (like investing).

We suffer from innumerable cognitive biases. Interestingly, even though we've read about these biases a million times, we still fall for them (blame your brain). The idea of dealing with these biases is not to try and eliminate them, but to try and minimize the mistakes caused by them.

Checking stock prices daily, focusing on the short term, reading a lot of news, and indulging in “social media” investing triggers a lot of these bia. Avoiding or minimizing these activities i.e., noise, will automatically minimize your behavioral mistakes.

Great investors are those who are generally less affected by cognitive bias than the general population, learn about biases and how to cope with them, and put themselves in a work environment that allows them to think well.

8. Crypto Corner

9. Memes of the Day

 

 

 

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