Dinosaur Bone Treasury Company: A Mailbag Episode

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All right, Matt.

Bye.

Whoa, you're back.

Hello.

Hello, and welcome to the same recording session.

I like it when we bend time.

Yeah, yeah.

It was impressive impressive the first time.

Now it's like, oh, yes, we're recording two money stuss for two separate weeks.

It's not that.

Right.

Other people have also recorded more than one thing at a time.

Yeah, I guess, you know, the fact that we're so charmed by this, or at least I am.

You're like a professional, you know, recorder of media.

I guess you only do live TV.

I know.

That's the thing.

I'm used to the light is red and my heart is racing.

But this is very chill.

Right.

Me, me, still an amateur at all,

all recorded media.

Let's do this in 20 minutes.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

I don't know about that.

Hello, and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast, your weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related to money.

I'm Matt Levine, and I write the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.

And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.

And today is Mail Back.

You didn't sing.

No, I didn't sing.

Come on.

I queued you to sing it.

That's all we need.

That's true.

I took it.

Okay, so let's get right into it.

Yeah.

Mailbag.

From Josh, I saw this tweet about securities law.

As to DoorDash a blooming onion from Outback Steakhouse, you pay a fixed price now and receive it later.

It is therefore a futures contract and thus illegal under the Onion Futures Act question.

Are DoorDash orders a futures contract and therefore subject to securities law?

I like this question.

I love this question.

Okay, so first of all, onion futures are not securities.

They're commodities.

But famously, basically every commodity can be traded on a futures exchange, including things that are not commodities like interest rates and sports bets.

But the only things that cannot be traded on futures exchanges are

motion picture receipts.

Oh, yes.

Tip of my tongue.

Part of the Onion Futures Act and onions.

Onion futures cannot be traded because there's like a famous story in the 50s of someone cornering the market for onions and like Congress got so mad that they banned trading of onion futures.

So if you DoorDash a blooming onion, have you violated that law?

Okay.

This is a great question because the difference between future and spot is actually quite legally meaningful and quite vague.

The answer is no.

So if you order an onion now and it arrives in an hour,

that is not a futures contract.

That's a spot delivery.

You have just ordered an onion on the spot market.

Interesting.

But there is no clear distinction between spot and futures.

It seems like, you know, the CFTC says that a spot contract is one that is intended to be physically settled within a few days.

So if you order an onion now to be delivered, you know, if you like order from a grocery store and like it's going to be delivered to you in three days, that's probably.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

If you like set up an Instacart order for like next week, it's probably fun.

There's a retail provision

in the Commodities Act that uses 28 days as a dividing line, which is

sometimes used as a rule of thumb.

That's really interesting because I feel like from Amazon, you can subscribe to onions.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, you can get onions delivered to you on a schedule.

Interesting.

I think that.

You can do that with cat food.

I haven't tried it with onions.

This is definitely not legal advice.

I think probably nobody's going to enforce that.

I don't think I'm going to treat that as a futures contract.

That feels very spot.

But you're right.

One reason it feels very spot is because I believe that Amazon will, you know, if the prices change, they'll change the price.

Like, I think that they

don't lock in.

Like, if you do a subscribe and save, you don't lock in the price until the end of time.

Interesting.

So it's essentially a new series of spot contracts.

I've never actually done subscribe and save.

I order

never for an onion.

Never for an onion.

I'm going to now, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That'd be interesting.

And then engineer the onion market so that prices change dramatically.

So I think about this a lot because in stocks, it's actually, it's the other way around.

Like

there is a very legally sensitive thing in stock trading, which is naked short selling.

If you

promise me that you will deliver me Tesla shares

tomorrow and you don't have the Tesla shares or you don't like...

have reasonable basis to believe that you can borrow those Tesla shares, you have committed naked short selling.

People get really, really mad about that.

But if you promise to deliver me Tesla shares in a year, you do not have to borrow those shares.

That's a futures contract or forward contract, and that doesn't count.

And

this is extremely not legal advice, but no one knows what the dividing line between a spot sale and a future sale of stock is.

But again, it's like...

It's in the like, I think I used to use a rule of thumb of 10 days.

It's something like that.

It's like, if you say you're going to deliver me Tesla stock tomorrow or in a week, that's probably a spot sale and you need to have a locate to borrow the stock or else you're committing naked short selling and you're in trouble.

But if you say two weeks or a month or a year, then it's a forward contract and it's legal.

So it's the opposite.

Like in onions, a forward contract is illegal.

In stocks, naked spot contract is illegal.

We spent seven minutes on this question.

Okay,

you're really going to hold me to 20 minutes of this episode.

All right.

Mailbag.

Mailbag.

From Daniel.

Why don't the underwriters for IPOs seem to factor in retail mania?

It seems like something you could do as an underwriter is have an analyst do the due diligence, spend thousands of hours in Excel crunching the numbers, get a fair valuation for the stock, and then when you have the final number, the managing partner can just multiply it by two because a bunch of retail traders will buy it anyway.

But they don't seem to do that, even though it seems like it would make sense.

Also, who gets fired when a company trades on its first day at 200% above the IPO price?

And who gets to retire and buy a yacht?

So this is about Figma, I think.

Yes.

This is about everything.

I was about to bring up Figma because that's exactly what happened.

Right.

So Figma,

by the time this airs, we'll have done an IPO about two weeks ago.

But Figma did an IPO where it sold stock at $33 a share and it bounced to like $112 or something on the first night.

And every time that happens, people, and by people I mean Bill Gurley specifically, go on Twitter to complain about IPO pops and how the company left money on the table.

Right.

And people who work in capital markets and people who work at Figma do not think that way, right?

Like Figma and its venture capitalists were very happy to leave money on the table.

Yeah, talk more because this is inevitably going to happen again.

It's happened for decades.

Yeah.

Curly has complained about it for decades.

So from Figma's perspective, they are...

a company with a shareholder base and they're shifting their shareholder base quite dramatically, right?

They're going from these venture capitalists who own them in the private markets to public investors who own them in the public markets.

And if you're Figma CEO, you have a relationship with your investors.

I'm getting a whole new set of investors.

I want a relationship with them.

I want good investors.

I want investors who I think are in it for the long term and will be supportive of me and will be like good advisors and will be, you know, not flighty and not get mad at me if like the stock goes down one day and who believe in my long-term vision.

And so you go out and meet with a bunch of investors and there's some that you like.

And then they say, I'll buy the stock at this price.

And you're like, okay, great, here, have a lot of the stock.

And then some other people at like Citadel will buy it at a higher price.

And you're like, I don't want those guys.

I want the long-term guys.

And so you pick, and like Bloomberg had reporting on this, like there were specific long-term investors they wanted in the stock.

And if they raised the price, they could easily get the deal done, but they would lose those people.

And they're like, no, I'd rather have those people.

And the stock they're selling in this deal just doesn't matter in the long term.

What matters in the long term is like their long-term relationship with their investor base and with their capital markets.

And giving everyone a pop on the first day makes investors love you.

And so it's just better for like the long-term business.

And similarly, you know, Figma was the company sold some stock and then shareholders, you know, venture capitalists and like executives sold some stock.

And those people, you know, did fine.

Like they made money.

And then the rest of their stock, because they didn't sell all of their stock, the rest of their stock is now worth a lot because the stock traded up.

And having the stock trade up makes it easier for them to sell stock in the future.

And they're happy with that.

This is why, you know, everyone is happy with an IPO pop because

they didn't need that money that much, right?

Like

the amount of money they left on the table is just not that important compared to like setting up the long-term relationship.

That's like the short answer to like the who gets fired question.

The answer, no one gets fired.

And particularly, like, what would be bad is if the bankers,

and this does happen, honestly, if the bankers went to Figma and were like, you cannot price this a penny above 33.

The book is really weak right here.

And we don't think it'll trade well at 33.

And Figma's like, we really wanted 35, but if you insist, and then it traded up to 112, like the bankers would look really stupid.

That's not what happened here.

Like, what happened here is they're like, we're 40 times covered.

Like, there's a ton of demand, but these investors will be out above 33.

And Figma's like, I'd rather have those investors.

Like, they were fully informed here, reasonably fully informed.

But the other thing I want to talk about is Daniel's original question is, why don't they factor in retail mania?

They do, but

it is an interesting question.

Like, my impression is that when I was an ECM banker, you know, a decade ago, retail was a pretty small part of the experience of doing an IPO.

And you thought of institutions as price setters.

And then you get like, you expected a little bump from retail because like the day after the deal prices, all the retail people who couldn't get into the deal will want to buy.

And so there'll be like a nice lift there.

But it's not, it's not a mania.

And now I think ECM bankers, equity capital markets bankers, are having to figure out how to think about meme stocks and retail mania.

Yeah.

It's not so much in the IPO business.

It's in the like going to companies that might be meme stocks and saying, you should really have an at-the-market stock offering set up because if a meme hits, you want to be able to sell stock into it.

And so I've talked to ECM bankers and like they are thinking about how to capitalize on retail insanity.

But it's not natural to them.

Like they, you know, they spend all day talking to big

institutional managers.

And

to then also lurk on reddit boards is a bit of a shift it's funny but that's just a fact of life now yeah it's only they haven't noticed so they aren't thinking about it it's just like it's a mentality shift yeah

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Mailbag.

I really like this question from Tony.

Okay, yeah, me too.

Okay, I'm going to try to read it.

Do it.

If Bitcoin treasury companies are priced irrationally as alternatives to ETFs, does that suggest a publicly traded company with a treasury strategy is a good alternative for alternatives that don't easily fit into an ETF?

Fine art treasury company, diamonds and gems treasury company, not actually Onions Futures treasury company, et cetera.

This is a really interesting idea.

So there is a gold treasury company.

I wrote about it.

It's called BioSig because it's like a biotech company.

They got bored of being a biotech company.

And they're like, we're going to buy a lot of gold.

Yeah, which is not the trade that a lot of people are making.

I feel like biotech is more interesting than gold.

But anyway, gold miner.

They're not like pivoting to being a gold miner.

They're just buying a lot of gold and they're a treasury company.

So yes, it's like an ETF.

And right, the thought process that Tony had is the thought process that a lot of CEOs of small biotech companies have had, which is that if you're a Bitcoin treasury company, your stock trades at two times, give or take, your NAV.

Yeah.

And that's much better than being an ETF where you trade pretty rigorously at one time your NAV.

And so

every crypto person has started a crypto treasury company because you can double the value of your crypto.

And then people look around and are like, what else can we do that to?

And gold seems to be part of the answer.

This company, it's like the fundraise is weird, so it's hard to tell what their premium is, but they do seem to be trading at a premium to the value of the gold.

Yeah.

Didn't GameStop buy

diamond, like some sort of miners?

Oh, AM.

No, no, AMC bought a gold mine, but that was long before the treasury company.

That was something.

That was just a comedy thing.

But no, actually, some company bought GameStop stock as a treasury company.

Oh, right.

But you can't really.

Stock is one thing you can't really do because if you're 100% a stock treasury company, you're an investment company and this doesn't work.

Yeah.

But Tony is right that Biosake

owns gold, but it like wants to be a commodity treasury company.

But other, like, the world is your oyster.

Anything that you can think of.

that you want to be a treasury company of, you can try it.

This is so exciting.

Right.

So there's two problems with it.

Maybe more than two problems.

One problem is you have to sell it to retail, right?

Like crypto, this is like a known playbook and it's gotten a little thin, right?

Everyone says the same things, like we're going to do investor education and like modernize the payment system.

And like eventually people stop believing it.

And so like the premium in crypto is like slowly eroding.

Yeah.

But you have to tell a new story with a new thing.

And gold is like a crypto adjacent story, right?

I'm not excited by gold.

No, I understand, but you're not excited by Bitcoin treasury companies necessarily either.

No, but I'm more excited by the idea of you could have a treasury company for fine art, for example.

Yeah, right.

So you need a story.

And the story needs to appeal to a lot of people.

And those people ideally are like retail weirdos on Reddit, but like there's a lot of stories you can tell.

And fine art's a great slot.

Dinosaur bones.

Dinosaur bones.

The other thing you need to do, like a treasury company is not really about the thing, crypto or

gold or fine art or whatever.

What a treasury company is,

what microstrategy is, is a company that has stock that trades above its net asset value and it sells stock at above the net asset value and it buys more assets.

And it's just a flywheel.

I read some paper that called it accretive dilution.

The more stock you sell,

the more value you create for your shareholders because, like, you're selling stock for $200

and then buying $200 worth of stuff, and then your stock has gone up by $400.

That's a great trade.

Yeah.

It has nothing to do with the underlying thing.

It has to do with the amount of hype you can get and then with investors buying into that repeated process.

So

if you can do that, like that's the first step is can you get people to pay 100% premium to net asset value?

If you can, then anything you buy, it's going to be a good strategy.

It's going to work, right?

Like it's going to be a good trade for shareholders.

But that relies on the original shareholders buying for two times NAV.

Yeah.

And the question is, can you sell that story?

And I do think that Tony is right that you can sell that story story for things other than crypto.

I think gold seems to kind of work.

I think someone should definitely do a diamonds one, fine art, whatever.

But like onions, probably not.

But like, I don't know.

Probably not onions.

I am excited because you can put gold in an ETF.

You can also put crypto.

I know, but you can't sell it at 200% of NAV.

I know.

That's really important.

No, I want to see them put an asset that you can't put into an ETF into a treasury company, such as fine art.

You can put anything into an ETF.

Yeah, private credit treasury company.

There you go.

Mailbag.

Mailbag.

Duncan.

Duncan has a multiple parter here.

No, it's not.

It's got two parts.

Why aren't there formalized hedging markets for sports outcomes?

I must imagine there are chains of bars and restaurants concentrated in areas associated with sports venues.

Those locations position them to benefit from additional home games, incremental spending associated with large victories, but only in positive outcomes.

Wouldn't bars around Wrigley Field in Chicago be interested in hedging the risk associated with potentially 10 plus more home outings in a season if they make the playoffs?

So this is a question this comes up a lot, weirdly.

Like

there are now, as I mentioned, futures exchanges where you can trade futures on things like, will the Cubs win tonight?

And in the ordinary course, you would say, oh, yes, that's sports gambling.

But it's very important to a lot of people, including at Robinhood and also Calci and also other prediction markets.

It's very important to a lot of people to say, no, no, no, that's not sports gambling.

That's a a futures market.

And what makes a thing a futures market rather than a sports book?

Part of the answer is like, in theory, in a futures market, you are trading or betting against other participants in the market rather than against the book.

This is not actually...

important.

Like actual sports books, like you can have a sports book website where like the people taking the other side of the bet are market makers and like on a futures exchange, the people taking the other side of the bet are probably market makers.

So it's not as different as it seems.

But like technically, yeah, if you go to a sports sports book, you're betting against the sports book.

If you're going to a futures exchange, you're betting against other participants on the futures exchange.

But the other thing that makes it different is there's this sense that futures exchanges offer like some sort of real

economic benefit other than gambling.

And when you think about sports futures, like what is that benefit?

Well,

hedging is the best answer.

And so you will regularly see people say, oh, yeah, of course we should have a sports prediction market and a regulated futures exchange because bars near Wrigley Field need to hedge the risk of not making the playoffs and not having 10 more home games to sell beer at.

And this always struck me as absurd, but it is true that there's like some tiny marginal hedging benefit.

And that tiny marginal hedging benefit,

theoretical hedging benefit, is the wedge that people use to justify futures markets as sports gambling platforms.

I once talked to a person who works in the sports futures business who said, well, you know, there's like big brands that sign multi-million dollar marketing deals with tennis stars.

And like their performance in tennis tournaments is economically material to like Nike or whatever.

So they should be able to hedge that in the sports futures market.

Right.

So sure, why not?

So that's why, that's why this is all happening, right?

Like the reason that there are increasingly legal and popular sports futures exchanges is because they can be like, no, it's not gambling, it's for bars to hedge.

Yeah, totally innocent.

Great question, Duncan.

Mailbag.

Mailbag.

Leo also has a question, and his question is that I just opened a no-penalty CD at my bank, and I'm trying to figure out how this product makes any sense for the bank.

The terms are basically that it's about 25 basis points higher interest than their high-yield savings with a fixed rate, and your money is locked up for the first week.

And after that, you can withdraw all your money including to date earned interest at any time but you have to take out all your money at once how is this a higher yield product than a savings yeah okay this is like all of retail finance yeah

this is credit card rewards is everything right this is the business of a bank is like monetizing depositor inattention We talked about, I think, on the podcast, the CFPB case against Capital One.

So Capital One, they offered this high-yield savings account called 360 Savings, and it had a high yield, and people put their money into it.

And then after a while, they started lowering the yield.

Or I guess they lowered the yield when rates went to zero, and they just didn't bring it back up.

And instead, what they did is they launched a new high-yield savings account called 360 Performance Savings that did have a high yield.

And so they could advertise the high yield on the new account to new customers and bring in new customers with competitive rates.

But the old customers, who didn't notice that they were getting low rates, just continued to get low rates.

Yes.

You You just do this forever.

You'd get in trouble, although not anymore.

They were briefly in trouble, but then they weren't.

But this is everything, right?

The point of, you know, Leo's asking about a no-penalty CD, where he basically gets a higher rate than a savings account, but his money isn't actually locked up.

Like traditionally, a CD, your money is locked up for three months or six months or whatever.

Right.

And this is one where your money is not locked up.

So it's really like a savings account, but it has a higher yield than your savings account.

The reason they're offering that is because they are hoping that you will think of it as a CD and you will forget and you won't take your money out even if rates go up.

And so they will get the advantage of paying you a lower rate and it will feel to them like a C D and they will get the sort of like financial benefits of a C D.

And if you are ruthlessly attentive and value maximizing, you will get some profit out of this at the expense of the bank.

But the bank is playing a statistical game.

They figure most of their clients will not do that.

And so they will make money on it.

Yeah.

It's also probably a rates bet.

Like they're probably just betting that rates will go down and so it won't cost them anything.

Right.

Like it's like a,

they're making a directional bet.

But the main thing is just like they expect people not to maximize.

They don't think you're paying attention, Leo.

And this is like everything.

Like credit card rewards are like the classic case where every credit card product has really high rewards on some category of spending.

And if you are a ruthless maximizer, and there are people, there are forums where people do this, right?

If you're a ruthless maximizer, you'll use your gas credit card only to buy gas, and you'll use your dining credit card only to pay for meals, and you'll use your travel credit card only for travel, and you'll get a very high rate of cash back on all of your purchases, and you will cost each of your credit card issuers money.

But almost no one is like that.

Almost everyone picks one credit card and uses it for everything, and they get high cash back on one category of spending and nothing on, or like low cash back on the other categories, and the issuers make money.

And this is like so clearly statistically true that the issuers have a great business, even though if you're the one person who does it right you'll make money and so there are forums and money stuff readers who are probably like more maximizing than like the average customer but the bank makes money on the average customer

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All right, we have a few more questions.

We have some rapid-fire questions.

All right.

Mailbag.

Mailbag.

Henry asks, what is your spirit security?

Like a spirit animal, but a security.

So, now I'm worried it's a commodity.

I was going to say cattle futures.

Commodities.

Yeah.

So what's that?

That sounds kind of grim.

Yeah, but you know, don't you sometimes just feel like a beaten mule?

That's still different from a slaughtered cow.

What's your spirit security?

My spirit security is feline prides,

which is, I believe, trademarked by Merrill Lynch.

I was an equity-linked security structure at a bank and name the bank at Goldman.

Yeah.

And there's a form of equity linked security called a mandatory convertible unit, which is ferociously complicated.

Basically, it's like a variable share forward contract stock collateralized by this bond that gets remarketed at the end of the forward term.

It's so complicated.

But also

in the glory days of derivative structuring, these things had to have names and they had to have acronyms, right?

Like now they're calling mandatory convertible units.

But there's some flavor, I don't remember the exact details, but some flavor of mandatory convertible units that were, I believe, trademarked by Merrill Lynch that were called feline prides, which stood for something like flexible equity-linked.

I don't even know what prides is like preferred,

pre-marketed, debt equity instrument.

I made it up.

That's not what it stands for.

But you can look it up, maybe.

It probably exists on a MoneySluff column.

But yeah, feline prides were a form of a mandatory convertible unit that were complicated enough as a security,

but incredible, like the pinnacle of acronyming work of all of finance, those feline prods.

Man.

Mailbag.

Mailbag.

I like this question.

I have a short answer here.

How does Katie feel about being described by Google as an internet personality rather than, say, a financial journalist?

I like that because it suggests I have a personality, so I'm fine with it.

Yeah, I would probably be happier if, I don't know how I'm described by Google, but internet personalities.

Yeah.

It's pretty much the pinnacle of careers these days.

I feel great, Mike.

Mailbag.

Mailbag.

And from Joel, I have a question for Kitty.

Are business.

I should read this in anchor voice, but I can't.

I'm not trained.

Put on the mask.

I have a question for Katie.

Are business news network anchors specifically trained on vocal patterns designed to make everything sound tense and serious?

When I listen to you on the podcast, I don't notice this.

However, I happened to catch you on on Bloomberg TV while traveling, and you sounded different.

It fits the pattern I hear on CNBC, Fox Business, et cetera.

But I've never observed this on other live TV news formats in a sustained way.

Maybe it's just me.

I love this question, and I've never really thought about it, and I don't think I've ever been trained

formally.

I clearly haven't.

Maybe I should have been.

So there's different types of speaking that you do on air as an anchor.

Wait, I want to hear more.

This is a good one.

There's reading from the prompter.

Okay.

You know, when you're just reading the intro to a guest or straight news.

And then there's the voice that you use while asking questions.

And by the way, I come up with my own questions.

I get this question a lot, actually.

Like, do they write questions for you?

And it's like, no, they don't.

Anyway, so.

That's not on the prompter.

That's all you.

Yeah.

If you're reading from the prompter, prompter is written in such a way that you kind of naturally fall into like the anchor voice.

Also,

I don't know.

I just feel like it's osmosis.

Like I'm sitting next to people who have also been anchoring for a lot longer than me and they talk in that voice.

So you kind of just talk in that voice.

And then when you're asking someone a question, just the, I don't know, just the stage of television, you talk differently than you would on a podcast.

But then even if I'm on TV, the way that I'm answering a question is different than the way I'm asking a question.

I think just the fact that I'm on this podcast and I'm talking versus asking a question or answering a question, this is more of a conversation, so I sound more like a normal human.

But I haven't, no one, no one told me to talk that way.

It's just kind of what you do, you know?

It's just like natural selection.

Yeah.

If you didn't talk that way, you wouldn't be on television.

Yeah.

Do you think that you make everything sound tense and serious?

I try not to.

I mean, if it's a tense and serious.

Let's see what he means.

Yeah.

I mean, you do speak with some urgency on TV.

I realize

sort of a weird fact of being on television is that time feels different on television.

Like 10 seconds, if someone says 10 seconds in my ear, there's so much you can say in 10 seconds.

If you're on TV.

Yes.

If you're in real life.

I don't do a lot of TV, but I have noticed that where like a three-minute TV hit feels like an hour.

Yeah.

Like even when they're counting down five, four, three, like I know I should probably be tagging saying this is Bloomberg at three, but you really don't need to say it until two.

You know, so it really warps your sense of time.

And I think that that urgency can sometimes show up in sounding serious.

No, I know what you mean because you said we're going to do this segment in 20 minutes.

Yeah, and

I just flew past it.

I could have said so many words in this time.

All right, that was fun.

I think we'll air this.

Yeah, sounds good.

All right.

So we'll see you in two weeks.

Hope you're having fun on vacation, Matt.

Yeah, right, right.

It's now

possibly August 15th, and we'll be back on August, possibly 29th.

I don't even know.

See you then.

We'll see you sometime.

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

I'm Matt Livian.

And I'm Katie Greyfeld.

You can find my work by subscribing to the Money Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg.com.

And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day on Open Interest between 9 to 11 a.m.

Eastern.

We'd love to hear from you.

You can send an email to moneypod at bloomberg.net.

Ask us a question and we might answer it on air.

You can also subscribe to our show wherever wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review.

It helps more people find the show.

The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Mazarakis and Moses Andam.

Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples and Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.

Thanks for listening to the Money Stuff Podcast.

We'll be back next week with more stuff.

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