Exchange Invest Weekend Edition 2722: The Barbie Effect
QE origin story? Barbie gives investor alpha, art fakes, digital stings, memestocks vilify the messenger & the vital Suwalki Gap.
Exchange Invest is a unique information resource combining the day’s stories in a newsletter for investors in exchanges/financial markets infrastructure.
Exchange Invest was founded by former exchange CEO and author of the first bestselling book of fintech (“Capital Market Revolution!” FT 1999) Patrick L Young. Monday through Friday our daily paid subscriber email discusses the business of bourses of all kinds across the world.
This weekly edition is a magazine of broader macro topics as well as including our free weekly podcast which reviews the highlights of the week in the world’s market structure.
On this day in 2003, a heat wave and a drought gauged a multibillion-dollar hole into Europe’s economy, crippling shipping, shrivelling crops and driving up the cost of electricity.
IN BIGWORLD
From Exchange Invest 2721: Friday, July 28th:
Out in Social Media land — where we have been adding a pink hue thanks to Barbiemania for the past week, it’s been, oh weeks (a generation or three in SM terms) since Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta-Book or whatever it’s called these days (running Facebook where fraudsters can run amok stealing folks ID without a concern from Zuckerberg’s management team it seems) launched Threads, a Twitter clone which is closed to everybody in the EU…
Last month’s future already looks like a dead thing by the end of the year. Part of that is because X — formerly Twitter — is a sucky business model to follow. Bad for targeting ads and much else besides.
Therefore ignore the many obituaries of X stating Elon Musk is a dweeb. The reality is he’s going to kill legacy Twitter by endeavouring to morph it into some replica of WeChat…AKA precisely the kind of digital money/networking innovation which could really radically revamp e-commerce for a generation across the western world.
Or to put it in historical perspective some young guy had a company called X.com which he rebranded as Paypal.com in 2001 and then sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. His name was Elon Musk.
Twitter becoming X is unfinished business where Paypal has become a kind of halfway house between slow old-fi and new new fi….
IPO-VID LIVESTREAM
NOW ONLINE!: Season 20: Episode 01
IPO-VID Livestream 114
Guest: Susan Gidel
Tuesday, July 25th: 1800 UK, 1900 CET, 1400 EST
“Astrology, the Markets, and You”
Susan Abbott Gidel specializes in financial astrological market research honed from 35 years in the commodity futures business as a journalist and brokerage firm marketing executive.
Based in Chicago, she is a regular on the conference circuit for professional astrologers and in 2018, Susan published “Trading In Sync With Commodities — Introducing Astrology To Your Technical Toolbox.” Her first book, published in 2000, was about stock indexes.
Currently, Susan publishes a newsletter, “Red Letter Trading Days,” alerting traders & investors to important astrological energy. She also writes the weekly “Finstrology” column at Astrology.com.
Watch the stream on:
IPO-VID LIVESTREAM PODCAST
In IPO-VID Episode 108: Patrick L Young was joined by Hertshten Group founder, Gedon Hertshten.
Let’s listen and explore this interesting episode about the “Markets For The Next Generation.”
Now available from multiple different podcast sources including:
Anchor Spotify Google Podcasts Apple Podcast
EI WEEKLY PODCAST
Steady NASDAQ Growth
As DB1 Euroclear Makes Great Leaps Forward Thanks To Interest Income Growth
CME Pauses With 3% Layoffs
And Exchange Invest Finds The Barbie Effect
The Exchange Invest Weekly Podcast 204
VICTORY OR DEATH
20 years on from the first fintech bestseller “Capital Market Revolution!”… “Victory Or Death” is a must-read book for anyone interested in the intersection of Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and FinTech as part of the whole future of finance.
FINANCE BOOK OF THE WEEK
In response to reader’s queries, we have added a book of the week column to the EI weekend edition — You can sign up for EI Weekend for free at ExchangeInvest.com incidentally.
We’re choosing interesting books pertaining to exchanges and markets, investment et al.
This week’s book was written by Michael Lewis, featuring our IPO-VID guest 019 & one of the Flash Boys, Ronan Ryan.
“Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” a game-changing bestseller, a small group of Wall Street iconoclasts realize that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders. They band together―some of them walking away from seven-figure salaries―to investigate, expose, and reform the insidious new ways that Wall Street generates profits. If you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you.
Get the book here.
Suggestions welcome if you would like to nominate a book for us to cover!
Our next Book of the week will be unveiled Saturday in the EI Weekend Edition.
& don’t forget if you want all the news on the bourse business sent daily to your Inbox subscribe to Exchange Invest — via Exchange Invest.com — it’s only $349 per annum to join “The Exchange of Information.”
PARISH NOTES
From Exchange Invest 2718:
The Barbie Effect?
AKA How Exchange Invest’s Ace Research team donned pink lab coats to discover a 200 Basis Point pick-up.
Last year we popped a little bubble which had quite gripped the “meeja” at one point: that there was somehow an Anne Hathaway effect of her movies boosting the stock market.
That was rather disappointing all round as we remain partial to movies with La Hathaway but investment alpha alas they did not deliver! However, our ace research team who power Exchange Invest’s thinking donned their finest pink lab coats and found some rather fascinating data which suggests… not only is that remarkable doll box office gold right now but there may even be a “Barbie effect” in the stock market too!
Barbie already exerts considerable leverage on parent company Mattel. Her portfolio accounted for some 20% of the company’s profits… even before the firm moved into the movie business. Over $377 million dollars worldwide later, after a fabulous first weekend in cinemas, Barbie is in the pink in every sense.
So, looking at the movie, we pondered the alpha (female) question: does Barbie in her movie guise add value to Mattel stock?
We identified some 38 key points in the Barbie production development dating back all the way to the announcement of Barbie going full Tinseltown (way back in 2009) and then through the roster of directors and Hollywood stars being added to the movie…
Move through trailer releases, various commercial partnerships and all manner of launches / publicity announcements et al and our ace researchers burnt the midnight oil to wrap their project last Friday even before the incredible first weekend of general release demonstrated that Oppenheimer thought it had the nuclear bomb thing all wrapped up but it couldn’t keep up with the simply quantum explosion of Barbie power.
So, it’s not nuclear mega BUT there’s a clear impact here. Over 38 iterations, Barbie movie announcements inspired 22 up days for Mattel stock and 16 down days. By comparison, on the same days, the S&P 500 managed 18 days up and 20 days down.
The end results aren’t seismic but we are looking at 38 days — not even 2 months in the aggregate of stock trading — and Barbie the movie gave us a 3.83% return when the S&P 500 managed 1.77%. That’s quite an edge over 38 sessions… Over 200 basis points of return or more than double the US benchmark index over the same period…
So where Anne Hathaway remains a bewitching star but couldn’t deliver investment returns to the broad market (always a big ask), thinking pink for your investment may make sense. On our modest data set, there is evidence Barbie has a positive impact on Mattel which helps it outperform the S&P 500.
Cue more calls following on from our post last Monday that we’re long overdue new dolls in the classic series: Barbie investor, Barbie hedge fund manager & similar financial high achievers…
Anyway, the Barbie effect ought to be welcome news for all those encouraging female investments as well as NASDAQ who list Mattel et al…
You can share this post from our Social media (Website, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter & Medium) with your friends / colleagues and other Barbie fans…
BITCARNAGE
Pregnant Pauses
The pullback from any ‘new new’ thing always looks the same — a “pause.” Hence Nasdaq pulling back here reflects commercial savvy on their part but is bad news for crypto per se because — sorry — while Larry Fink and a few high profile others love the fees they can charge (and the rolls they can foresee) while hoping to cross sell millennials into legacy investments… the simple truth is financial institutions see crypto and even to a large extent digital assets of any kind as a wild west.
…When you Google how many folks have been arrested from the crypto V1.0 era, I can’t say I blame them either.
Hence: Nasdaq Pauses Crypto Custody Plans Citing The ‘Shifting’ Regulatory Climate (CNBC).
If you enjoyed this excerpt you may be interested to know that you can read Bitcarnage every day in Exchange Invest.
Alternatively, if you want to follow Bitcarnage — the daily update on happenings in the world of crypto and digital assets, then you can find Bitcarnage as a standalone on Substack.
MACRO THOUGHTS
Bigworld — the origins of QE? (From EI Tuesday, July 25th):
A lot of media time has been devoted of late to US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen landing in China and then visiting a branch of the Yi Zuo Yi Wang restaurant chain where she apparently ate jian shou qing, a variety of wild mushroom with unpredictable psychedelic effects (Janet Yellen Consumed Psychedelic Mushrooms In China: Report | ZeroHedge).
IMHO the issue is not that the Treasury Secretary did this, it’s more was a previous round of such consumption perhaps responsible for the folly of QE which Yellen expounded with gusto when running the Fed under the Obama administration? It’s a lot better explanation than any other I have yet seen for the QE farce.
OF INTEREST
As always, a review of interesting reading to provoke thoughts and consideration… Not sure we agree with much of it….but it’s thought-provoking!
Fascinating Forgeries: Art And Artifice — Fakes From The Collection, At The Courtauld, Reviewed
The Spectator
My Family’s Ordeal Reveals The Strange, Dystopian World Of School Gender Policies
CapX
FBI Digital Sting Against Hive Cybercrime Group Shows The Promise — And Limits — Of Hacking Hackers
Politico
“When the FBI took down a notorious cybercrime gang known as Hive earlier this year, it did so without arresting a single person.”
How Whistleblower Andrew Left Became The Short-Selling Villain Of The Meme Stock Market Craze
NY Post
Is The Suwałki Gap The Most Dangerous Place On Earth?
The Loop
Kaliningrad: Impregnable Fortress Or “Russian Alamo”?
CNA
PLY: I suspect not simply because heading into the Swualki Gap means a clear NATO transgression and I also think Poland is remarkably prepared for Russian aggression right now. However, it’s clearly a risk as the Wagner Group has just delivered a lot of its former troops into Belarus and that has many folks worrying.
LAST WORD
…If you want to stay abreast of the world of exchanges then please Subscribe to our Daily Newsletter — free 30 day trial.
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You can also check out the “Reflections From Young’s Pyramid”, it illustrates the relative value of exchanges around the world.
Or the “ICE Cost of Borrowing 2020–2022” An Interest Rate Comparison, which illustrates the end of the funny money era of QE and how interest rates have already had a major lurch up from their previous region of zero to, even negative, levels.
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Catch up on Monday for Exchange Invest 2723…
The future continues in the water cooler of the bourse business…
- Patrick
