Q: Can you tell us about the origins of Ramp Capital and your philosophy on the increasingly popular #FinTwit?
A: The origins of Ramp Capital go back to around 2013…
Without a doubt, Tesla is the cult stock of the Millennial and Gen Z generations. The young adults view Elon as a god—the Nikola Tesla of our time. Meanwhile, the Gen X and Boomer generations don’t appear to have the same fervor as their children do. I’d speculate that the majority of them don’t know how to accurately value Tesla with traditional financial metrics. Reading through various analyst reports you could come to the conclusion that analysts are in the same boat.
I’d rather be a tourist in a big city than a permanent resident.
They’re expensive, crowded, have higher crime rates, more pollution, traffic, and typically smell like shit. Sounds enticing.
Today, about half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. There are 400 cities with more than a million people. Roughly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. What’s strange though, according to Gallup, is Americans don’t want to live in big cities. They want to live in rural areas.
As Bob was painting one of the happy little trees, he mentioned one of his famous mantras “We don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents”. I couldn’t help but laugh at how simple his idea was. If only I could repeat that mantra every time I made an investing mistake, life would be much better.
The market has turned south so fast and so hard that it’s almost impossible to comprehend. On Thursday, we saw the worst single-day decline since the crash of 1987. Michael Batnick published a post that showed this is the fastest bear market in history. It took 19 days for the Dow Jones Industrial Average to drop 20%. I can’t even read a 300-page book in 19 days.
A year and a half ago, one of the greatest short calls of our generation was made by the biggest influencer in the world—not me. I’m speaking of Kylie Jenner of course.
On February 21st, 2018, Kylie Jenner tweeted out her disgust of Snapchat and their recent user interface change that made the product extremely hard to use—even for millennials.
I have always been and will most likely always be a meat-eater. I’ve read way too many research papers and books from very smart people and seen the results myself on what a paleo or keto type diet can do for people to cure a host of different ailments. When I see people eating this fake meat crap, I die a little inside.
A big part of investing in individual companies or running an active portfolio is trying to spot macro trends in their infancy and subsequently riding the wave to riches. For instance, when the iPad was released in 2010, I distinctly remember Fast Money making fun of the name that Apple had chosen for it—saying it sounded like some sort of feminine product. Meanwhile, I was loading up on common and calls, thinking about how the iPad could revolutionize many industries (textbooks, traditional PCs, newspapers, e-readers, etc.). And so it did, although I never held as long as I would have liked to.
It’s been five weeks now since Lyft has gone public. In that time, Lyft has taken a 38.6% haircut from the peak reached on the very first day of trading — Fibonacci fans rejoice. With the Uber IPO on deck, investors are surely wondering if it will turn out like Lyft’s IPO or if it’s different this time. Or maybe the entire ride-sharing business model is in a bear market.