Front-running the Ethereum front-runners

Money Stuff: Crypto Brothers Front-Ran the Front-Runners talks about a fascinating case, with further details in Money Stuff: The Endless Shrimp Investigation under header “ETH consensus”, the linked CoinDesk article: What the DOJ’s First MEV Lawsuit Means for Ethereum, as well as the …

Traditional banking system issues

Money Stuff: Banks Are Still Where the Money Isn’t talks about a curious phenomenon: a big bank (Barclays Plc) struggling to find the money to lend out for its credit cards, and ends up essentially borrowing money from private equity (Blackstone) to do it. Huh?! Isn’t, like, the entire point …

Income taxes are bullshit

In the news recently: Elon Musk’s US tax bill: $11 billion. Tesla’s: $0. Elon Musk has repeatedly bragged (or, perhaps, complained) that he’ll pay more in federal taxes for 2021 than anyone has ever paid — about $11 billion. But Tesla apparently won’t pay a cent. Tesla may not plan to pay federal …

Non-competes are getting outlawed in the US

I’ve referenced the excellent Money Stuff newsletter before, and I continue to absolutely recommend it to anybody with an interest in the world of finance. The most recent article: The FTC Comes for Noncompetes which is particularly relevant for anybody working in the field. Yesterday, the US …

Pastor runs crypto scam, blames God

As you know, I’m a sucker for hilarious finance news, and therefore for Matt Levine’s Money Stuff newsletter. More recently, this cracked me up: Pastor got his crypto scam audited. This has everything you could possibly desire in a finance story. […] a pastor named Eli Regalado …

C++ vs Rust: performance vs safety

I was reading Why I think C++ is still a desirable coding platform compared to Rust on Low Latency Trading Insights, and wanted to share my thoughts. Overall, I really appreciate this article: it raises a very important subject and makes lots of good points. I do disagree with some of it, though I …

Earning interest rate on Interactive Brokers cash balance

For my investments I normally use Degiro as a broker, because their app and website is quite decently usable, and their fees are low. However, it’s come to my attention that Interactive Brokers pays quite good interest on your cash balance with them: up to 4.83% currently. This is much better …

US lawmakers trading and stock ownership

Senators to propose ban on US lawmakers and executive branch members owning single stocks, once again. The Hacker News thread is also quite informative, for example: I started building out tools to track congressional stock trading in 2020. Since then, I believe there have been 9 other proposals …

Financial news and moving the markets

Daring Fireball wrote about the Apple GPT news. I think the news itself is pretty uninteresting: Apple wants in on the ChatGPT gold-rush even as it seems to be winding down. The more interesting part is what he writes about Bloomberg: Bloomberg reporters are evaluated and receive bonuses tied to …