Edenred's negative shareholder equity
Warren Buffet says it's a good idea to pay $0.50 to buy $1. What about paying 18€ for -3€? Let's talk about the surprisingly successful company Edenred.
Market Unpack
Making sense of market machinery
Latest posts
Martingale simulator
A martingale is a kind of betting strategy where you double your wager on every loss such that the first win recovers all previous losses plus a profit equal to the initial wager. It's pretty obvious this doesn't work in practice, but let's visualise it. Introducing the Martingale Simulator.
Retail CfD losses leaderboard
CfDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money, or so the warning goes. Many brokerages show this banner and say what percentage of retail clients lose money on CfDs with them. For the fun of it, let's rank them.
Boosting revenue with vendor financing
AI companies made headlines recently because of circular vendor financing. Basically, Nvidia invests in OpenAI which buys services from Oracle which buys chips from Nvidia. Surprisingly, this setup lets you boost ecosystem revenue by over 100% of money spent.
J.P. Morgan's OpenAI loan is strange
In October, OpenAI secured a 4 billion dollar revolving credit facility from J.P. Morgan and several other banks. I was surprised when I heard this because OpenAI is a young company with no earnings. Shouldn't all their capital come from investors? Let's run some numbers.
Bad headlines
A pet peeve of mine is formulaic financial news, the kind that just reads a few points off a price chart and calls it a day. Lots of newspapers are guilty of doing this, but none come close to Les Echos. Let's marvel at their terrible headlines together.
Gifts to reduce the US debt
It turns out you can donate money to the Treasury to pay off the US national debt. Some people actually do this.
On Japan's national debt
National debts, sovereign bonds, and yields have been in the news a lot this year. This made me realize I don't have a feel for what the numbers mean or what mechanisms affect the headline stats. So, let's look into the national debts of several countries, starting with Japan.
Adjusting interest for inflation
What's better: a 5% EUR bond subject to 3% inflation, or a 10% RON bond subject to 8% inflation? Let's calculate.
A model for market prices
Market prices are weird—when news comes out that should move them one way, they sometimes move the other way instead. What's going on? I have a hypothesis and a simple model.
Dissecting the "Euro area bank interest rate statistics" report
Every month, the ECB publishes a new snapshot of the interest rates in the euro area. How are the rates broken down and how did they evolve over the last year?
Bootstrapping corruption
In early February, DOGE sent every government employee an email asking them to list five things they've accomplished the previous week. This is obviously stupid, so why do it? In this post, I argue it's to bootstrap corruption into the system.
Ørsted's write-offs
Ørsted has had quite a few write-offs these last couple of years which led to a halving of the share price. Let's construct a timeline.
Dissecting the "Monetary developments in the euro area" report
Every month, the ECB publishes a report on recent monetary developments. Let's break the last one down and see what we can glean from it.
Dissecting the "Euro area monthly balance of payments" report
Every month, the ECB publishes a new "Euro area monthly balance of payments" report. Let's dive in and figure out what's in these.