1/28 Newsletter: Link dump

Hi all,

The semester and my research work are in full swing, so I don’t have time to do a full post this week. I spent most of my weekend trying to figure out when mutual funds tried to buy other mutual funds with extremely similar names, which is of course what every millennial dreams of doing in their career.

Here are a few things I found interesting this week:

• Seth Wickersham’s story on the dysfunctional  Cleveland Browns
• Kevin Roose’s report from Davos on how automation might be a bigger threat to jobs than generally thought
• Christina Farr’s story about a telehealth company for CNBC
• This podcast discussion on digital media between Kara Swisher and Meredith Artley, the editor-in-chief of CNN.com

Gus Update

On Sunday, I left the dog out of his cage while I went for a run. I returned to him sitting on his bed, thumping his tail slowly like a happy, sleepy dog.

Then I took a short shower, and came out to discover him covered in plaster and these holes in the wall.

Until next week!

 

 

1/21 Newsletter: The death of John Bogle

Hi, all:

I know most of the people reading this newsletter don’t follow financial news as closely as I do, so you may have missed the death of John Bogle last week. Bogle was the founder of the Vanguard financial firm and, essentially, the father of the modern mutual fund. Famous for his personal frugality and willingness to criticize his investment professional colleagues, Bogle’s shadow is a constant discussion point in every class I have had at Villanova.

One obvious reason for this is that Vanguard is in a neighboring suburb to the school, and he died in Bryn Mawr, one of the suburbs I pass through on the train every day. It is a local powerhouse, and my class actually toured the campus last year.

However, Bogle’s fundamental idea behind Vanguard’s mutual funds was that simply tracking a broader index of stocks would beat out active money managers over time — and he was generally correct.

He also built Vanguard as a low-cost mutual fund, essentially giving investors low-risk returns while taking in tiny fees and commissions relative to the rest of the industry. It would not be out of line to estimate that he saved investors well over $100 billion in fees by building his company in this way.

Now — as noted in the Philadelphia Inquirer obituary at the top of this blog — the passive investing style that he has helped pioneer is taking on an increasingly large share of the overall equity market, and there are concerns about whether this will warp the equity market in some way. This question is what some of my work as a research assistant at Villanova has been working toward, though we likely won’t know the true impact of this shift for years.

Links for this week

• • Everything on the internet was bad last week, so I have no stories to link to.
  • I watched Broadcast News with Holly Hunter (a $4 rental on Amazon Prime) and it was amusingly accurate about the types of personalities drawn to journalism.
  •  If I had to give a TED Talk to a bunch of journalism students about what they might not understand about how media in the United States works, it would have to do with scale. It is something that is hard to grasp when, as a student reporter, an event with 35 attendees seems like a big deal (and maybe truly is, on a college campus). In the country at large, though:

Fun with scale of media:

53.9 million people watched Chiefs-Pats last night, per @richarddeitsch. That is:

-about 39 % of the total 2016 electorate

And

-roughly 16 days of combined viewers of Hannity on FNC in primetime — if you assume different viewers every day.

— Jesse Pound (@jesserpound) January 21, 2019

Gus update

The windchill in Philadelphia is currently below zero degrees, so it is too cold to walk the dog and he is running circles around my apartment. Here he is in a rare moment of calm.

Until next week!

1/13 Newsletter: Spring semester and a shot of life for this site

Hi, everybody:

Sorry for the extended gap I had in blogging. I got bogged down by research and midterms and never really got back on track. I’ll try to do this weekly again this semester – even if it is just a link dump of interesting things I read that week.

My last semester at Villanova (and of school, ever, hopefully) starts tomorrow. My classes are:

• Portfolio Management (continued from the fall)
• Quantitative Finance
• Alternative Investments
• Financial Markets and Institutions

I expect this semester to be more difficult than last semester, but also much more applicable to a career in journalism. “Alternative Investments” and “Financial Markets and Institutions” should really help me understand how all of the different players in the financial sector work together.

(I am also hoping “Quantitative Finance” isn’t too quantitative, but I doubt I’ll be that lucky).

The “Alternative Investments” course will focus on the less-traditional financial organizations – mainly hedge funds and private equity firms. Peter Whoriskey of the Washington Post had a deep dive last month on how a private equity firm stripped down a supermarket chain and left the laid off workers with an underfunded pension plan.

What I love about this story is how it goes through the different steps the firm took as it ran the supermarket chain, up to and including the bankruptcy process. I think a lot of general citizens and journalists will – understandably – be angry at the private equity firm for this, but the detail Whoriskey puts in that story shows a lot of different issues with the whole process. Some of those issues put the PE firm in a better light, and others seem to suggest bankruptcy laws are unfair to workers. It is a story that uses a strong narrative to create multiple takeaways that aren’t simply “private equity firms are evil.”

Here are some other stories I loved recently:

• Jackie MacMullan on Jaylen Brown, a fascinating young player for the Boston Celtics.
• Shaun Raviv profiled a neuroscientist who thinks the way we are building AI leads to a dead end for Wired.
• Refugees, a book of short stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War, by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Since I haven’t done one of these in a while, I’ll include several photos of Gus, who is now seven months old. If I don’t write another of these by next week, please yell at me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading!

10/9 Newsletter: A delayed look at a great business story

Hi all,

I had two projects due Monday, so the newsletter had to be a couple of days late. I didn’t want to just dash off a quick post this week because I thought there was a really good story worth taking a closer look at.

First up is this great multimedia story from the Wall Street Journal on how the insurance industry is dealing with climate change. This is one of those stories that I think would cause a lot of people on both political sides to roll their eyes. Obviously, if you don’t believe climate change is real (or if you believe that it won’t be a problem), then the story is irrelevant in your eyes. On the other hand, Some people on the left who do realize that climate change is a problem may recoil about a story that they view as portraying big insurance corporations as a sympathetic victim of climate change.

As for me, this is my favorite kind of journalism story. This is cutting through political debate and looking at how the underlying mechanics of the world work in a way that it is both tangible now and predictive about the future. Rising insurance premiums may not be the most worrying thing about climate change, but they will play a major role in dictating migration patterns in the future.

Insurance companies have investors that are pension and retirement funds, as well, so their ability to correctly predict climate changes can have an impact on normal, everyday people.

For the journalism people reading this, the infographics on the story are also great. The story is broken up with interactive pieces and popping colors to make a really engrossing presentation.

Links

• Jason Nark from the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote the best high school football story I have read in a long, long time about a former Giants fullback now coaching a downtrodden team in coal country.
• Erin Beresini profiled Gwen Jorgensen for Outside. Jorgensen won gold in the triathlon in Rio but decided she’d rather just run marathons instead.
• There was a massive Bloomberg story about tiny chips discretely placed within computers bound for some of the biggest American tech companies. The denials of the story have been really aggressive.
• I talked about OU firing defensive coordinator Mike Stoops on Podcast on the Prairie.

Gus update

Gus is the king of the couch now.

Until next week!

9/30 Newsletter: Avoiding a Derivatives test

Hi all,

I’m not going to write very much this week, as one of my research professors has a, uh, creative definition of 10 hours of work per week, and I also have a take-home exam for my derivatives class I need to finish.

On the bright side, this derivatives class is the first time I have looked forward to learning more math since elementary school, probably. It is a nice reinforcement that grad school was a good decision.

Links:

• I saw the movie Blaze on Friday about 80s country-singer Blaze Foley. It was a pretty good movie, if a little too long (I was also the only person in the theater, so I’m guessing its success will be limited even by indie film standards). I went to see the movie because I heard Ethan Hawke (who directed it) talk about it and a lot of other stuff on Sean Fennessy’s podcast.
• This Reuters story on Saudi Arabia taking over the bin Laden family business is an amazingly detailed piece of reporting.
• Dana O’Neil’s story on the death of an LSU basketball player was short but powerful.
• The new issue of Esquire has an excerpt of a 1959 Ralph Ellison story on the American jazz scene. I can’t find a good link, but if you need something to read on an airplane this week you can pick one up at a Hudson News, I’m sure.
• I recommended Brian Phillips’ new book here last week. Here is an excerpt from it if you have never read him before.

Gus update

Gus is now four months old and weighs 16 pounds. He is getting his adult dog teeth. He has his rabies shot now, so I will need to buy him a dog license so he is all bona fide. He still isn’t big enough to carry this giant stick he gnaws on once a day when we walk by, though.

Until next week!

9/23 newsletter: Mergers, acquisitions and not-so-stuffed bunnies

Hi all,

The class that I am most behind in right now is called Investment Banking – and I am truly, terribly, I-don’t-know-what-the-book-is-called behind. The good news is that, so far, there hasn’t been a lot of math involved in the class (although, maybe that is what the book is for. I should really read that). Even though it is called Investment Banking, the course focuses on mergers and acquisitions from the corporate side. The idea is that if you are going to be an investment banker dreaming up and pulling off these corporate restructuring deals, you should be able to think of it from the perspective of the clients you are wooing to let you throw their company into chaos.

Reading and learning about company mergers is honestly really exciting – big personality CEOs, gobs of money and plenty of room to armchair quarterback and think “who ever thought that dumb idea would work?” I hope, though, that as I pursue a media career I remember for every M&A that it isn’t only the people at the top that are effected.

Just as in this class we are supposed to look at the deal through the eyes of management, I should try to look at the deal through the eyes of the lower-level employees who are having to hear and read about people they’ve never met make vague proclamations about the company they work for. It may not be as exciting as a flamboyant banking executive, and it may not move the stock market, but it is important journalism all the same.

Links

I didn’t have a lot of time to read this week besides absorbing the Wall Street Journal as fast as possible every day, so I’m giving some different recommendations this week.

• How about a link and recommendation to another newsletter? Charlie Warzel covers tech and the darkest corners of the internet for Buzzfeed. His essay on how media organizations are struggling to figure out what role to play in the online information war is worth a read.
• It has been a pretty great year for female country music artists. Put Kristina Murray’s Southern Ambrosia on your playlist for the week.
• Brian Phillips’ essay collection “Impossible Owls” comes out next month. In addition to being a fantastic writer, he was incredibly nice to me once for a class project.  Pre-order it.

Gus Update

The day I got Gus, back in July, I had to put him the bathroom for 20 minutes while I ran to PetCo to buy a bunch of puppy supplies in a hurry (the foster I adopted him from moved the meet up time on short notice). In the rush, I grabbed a bunch of toys, including a stuffed bunny bound with a pink rope that, as I discovered when I got home, was hopelessly big for little Gus. He couldn’t put his mouth around the rope part or really even the stubby little legs. The toy was too heavy for him to drag it around by the ears. He just kind of wrestled with it and yelped at it before eventually focusing on a tiny stuffed duck toy that was more in his wheelhouse.

Two months later, well:

RIP, little bunny. I leave you all with a picture of the vicious hunter, guarding a sock of mine that he stole. Thanks for reading.

9/16 Newsletter: Puerto Rico’s debt problems and a Fixed Income class

Hi all,

Earlier this week, I had one of those extremely fun experiences anyone who took high level math or science courses has had: I copied down three whiteboards’ worth of the derivation of a formula only for the professor to say “you don’t need to know that.” Great. Good thing I bought a pack of 10 legal-sized notepads.

But I do need to know what is going on in that Fixed Income class more generally, and I found an article this week that showed how it could be helpful for media members. Matt Wirz profiled Natalie Jaresko, head of Puerto Rico’s federal oversight board, for the Wall Street Journal. The short version of the story, for those of you who can’t get around the paywall, is that Jaresko has the unenviable job of trying to fix Puerto Rico’s finances – which were a disaster before last year’s hurricanes – and she is getting criticized on from every conceivable angle for it, with the criticism coming from the male-dominated worlds of politics and finance.

The article isn’t exactly numbers-heavy, but a good understanding of the fixed income market, and the municipal bond market of the United States more specifically, is vital to understanding the pressure Jaresko faces and how it could ripple throughout the world. The outcome of the Puerto Rico debt restructuring could have ramifications for every state or local government in the country, thus impacting how expensive it is to build that new high school or fill those pot holes.

Links

• I’ve put Elaina Plott’s writing in this space before, and I’ll probably do so regularly. Her piece on growing up around guns but also being the victim of a seemingly random shooting is well worth your time.
• Virginia Heffernan wrote an interesting essay for Wired on the prevalence of speed – as in things like Benzedrine and Adderall – in the United States since World War II. I don’t think I agree with all of it, but it was thought provoking.
• This piece from The Athletic‘s Rob Biertempfel about how the Pirates’ Trevor Williams is having fun with sharing a name with a defensive back for the Chargers is a nice job of keeping things interesting at the end of a long season. Baseball Trevor Williams has been the rare bright spot on the exceptionally mediocre Pirates.

Gus update

My puppy now weighs 13.5 pounds and managed to eat three pairs of my ear buds this week. I guess the brand name “Skullcandy” is literal when it comes to dogs.

Here is Gus chewing on something more appropriate.

Until next week!

9/9 Newsletter: Microsoft Excel and a war novel

Hi all,

This will be a fairly quick newsletter, as I am drowning in Excel files as a research assistant. The semester should really hit full speed here in the upcoming third week, so shorter newsletters will probably become more and more of the norm.

This week has seen a lot of the good and bad of being a business graduate student. On the one hand, I have learned more about derivative securities in two weeks of class than I ever thought possible and am studying a merger by Sprint for my Investment Banking class. This is real world, practical experience from really talented professors that will be helpful later on.

On the other hand, I also had to do a bunch of career-search stuff that was geared toward the business students and really not helpful to me at all. This isn’t a surprise – I knew I would be an outlier in some respects – but it can feel like a frustrating waste of time as other stuff piles up.

Links

Part of the reason I am a bit behind this weekend is because I spent all of my Friday night reading Cherry by Nico Walker. It is a new novel by a current prisoner who is in jail for robbing banks to support a drug addiction. Alexandra Alter wrote about Walker and the writing process for the New York Times.

It was really an incredible, if brutal, book. I have seen praise of it as one of the great novels about the Iraq War and as one of the great novels about the opioid epidemic.

I recommend it, but with a strong caveat: the language is really rough. NC-17 rough. The book is also male oriented – Ron Charles of the Washington Post compared it a Hemingway story and also described it as “Holden Caulfield Goes to War,” so yeah – but I think it is rescued by two things.

For one, the narrator seems to understand that the way women factor into his life, and therefore the book, is wrong, and generally he does not feel like a sympathetic character like the above referenced stories. He is a troubled narrator who doesn’t believe his own nonsense. Secondly, the book feels accurate and real. People my age will recognize people they know in the various characters in the book.

Gus update

It was a rainy week in Philadelphia, which means poor Gus has been cooped up too much and finding ways to destroy my apartment. Here he is trying to look innocent.

Until next week!

 

 

 

9/3 Newsletter: Semester 2 is underway

Happy Labor Day, everybody.

The fall semester of my master’s program started last week, so I am currently swamped with reading introductory chapters and trying to get fancy software for my financial portfolio class to work on my laptop. For those of you that care, this semester I am taking courses on fixed income (i.e. the bond market), derivatives, investment banking and portfolio management.

I also am now officially a research fellow, so I’ll be helping two professors out with research in addition to going to class. It will mostly be a lot of grunt work in Excel, so if it gets too boring I’ll just think of it as practice for doing data journalism projects down the line.

The portfolio management class involves “covering” certain companies – or at least their associated securities – and making recommendations about whether my MSF cohort should buy or sell the stock with money that Villanova has set aside for us to invest. This class should be excellent preparation for business journalism, as it involves a lot of the same reporting and critical thinking skills as following companies closely as a reporter.

Links

• I have spent most of this weekend devouring Boom Town by Sam Anderson. The book is a history of Oklahoma City and its lurching cycle of booms and busts. I’m about three-fourths through it now, but it has a little something for everyone: Thunder basketball, frontier history, city planning, Wayne Coyne, etc.
• The start of the college football season means the opener essay from Spencer Hall at Every Day Should Be Saturday. This year’s version is in four chunks, each several thousand words, but this one about Tennessee was my favorite and, as it is more about personal identity than sports, probably worth reading even if you don’t care about college football at all.
• Elaina Plott at The Atlantic on John McCain’s memorial service and how weird and out of place it felt in 2018 America.
• Former NFL player Domonique Foxworth wrote about how the career options available to athletes outside of sports dwindle the higher you climb toward the pro ranks and how he changed his focus to a post-football life.
• Two Reuters reporters in Myanmar were sentenced to seven years in prison for doing their jobs.
• Jennifer Breheny Wallace wrote about child perfectionism in the Wall Street Journal. 

Gus update

Gus continues to grow and slowly but surely get all his vaccinations. He is also very close to figuring out how to get up on the couch, which means I will have to move all of my stuff somewhere higher.

He has not, however, figured out how to sleep on top of beds.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!

 

 

Newsletter 8/26: Distressed debt, stressed grad student

I discovered late last week that there is a version of my Derivatives textbook for the upcoming semester that is made specifically for English-speaking students in India. Unfortunately, I discovered this after having already done several hours of working ahead to prepare for the upcoming semester and spending $30 on the wrong book.

Oh well. Maybe the knowledge of the history of financial derivatives in Southeast Asian markets and familiarity with foreign exchange problems involving Rupees will come in handy one day. For now, it just means that my motivation to get ahead was all for not.

One story this week did serve to re-energize me, though. This Wall Street Journal Toys-R-Us story by Gretchen Morgenson and Lillian Rizzo is a great example of why learning more about how companies are financially structured is important.

A quick overview for those who don’t want to read the whole thing: the story basically pinpoints a group of creditors who bought the failing company’s debt at a discount and then were able to block Toys-R-Us from leaving bankruptcy, resulting in workers losing jobs and suppliers losing a lot of money on outstanding bills.

The thing that killed off Toys-R-Us, then, was not Amazon or changing consumer tastes, but some firms that held less than 20 percent of Toys-R-Us’s debt – a position those companies took knowing that bankruptcy was a looming possibility.

Links

• I read a lot about Elizabeth Warren’s proposals to reform corporate board structures and make companies responsible to all stakeholders instead of just stockholders. Two opposing pieces here are from Matt Yglesias at Vox and Matthew Klein at Barron’s.
• Nicole Auerbach from The Athletic on Urban Meyer and Ohio State.
• Melanie Evans from the Wall Street Journal had a fascinating piece on how hospitals don’t even know how much medical procedures cost.
• I saw “Three Identical Strangers” this weekend, and I think it is my favorite movie of the year. As someone with two brothers fairly close in age, it probably hit closer to home for me than others, but it was a documentary that left me feeling unsatisfied in a way that was infuriating and powerful. Sean Fennessey wrote about our mini-boom in documentaries at The Ringer.

Gus update

It is national dog day, according to the internet, and my genius dog somehow locked himself in the bathroom while I am writing this post. I’ve had him for a month now, and he has made a lot of progress in getting trained (and doubled in size!) but oh man do I still have a long way to go.

I leave you with a photo of him harassing me as I try to make breakfast.