No Nap Rooms: Credit, Peace, 24X

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I'm just saying, like, something could like happen.

Right.

Something crazy could happen.

Right.

Something crazy could happen while we're recording this.

And

I'd have to go talk about it in like 52 minutes.

Isn't that exciting?

Like, you come in here an hour before you go on television and like you turn off your phone.

You obviously your phone is sitting right in front of you, but like let's pretend you turn off your phone and focus entirely on the Monday Stuff podcast.

And like, what if something crazy happens and you get out of here at like 259 and you go on air and they're like, something crazy happened?

You're like, yeah.

They're like, Katie, quick, break this headline about the asteroid that took out California.

And I'm like,

we're receiving reports or something like that.

I think you keep your life exciting.

I do love adrenaline.

Like, I crave adrenaline, but you know,

sometimes I get tired.

Yeah.

I'm pretty tired.

I was out

to a dinner until, like, midnight last night.

The star stuck.

I was approximately six hours later than my usual bedtime.

So I'm in bad shape.

Yeah, that's crazy pants.

Matt came over at nine in the morning with a smile on his face.

And I was like, how are you upright?

I had a fun dinner last night,

but it was way past my bedtime.

So now I'm going to do this and then collapse.

No, then you're going to go watch the close on Bloomberg television from 3 to 5.

You and I, our body batteries are turning in different directions.

You are going to your adrenaline-filled asteroid reporting, and I'm going to nap.

Just ramping.

I did come over to you yesterday and ask if you knew where the nap rooms are.

I can't tell people.

If there's Bloomberg.

There's no nap rooms at Bloomberg.

If there's Bloomberg people listening, they don't exist.

No nap rooms.

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

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

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

I think we're in the like pest control season of the podcast.

We're talking about bugs.

There are like 200 Bloomberg headlines in the last three days about cockroaches.

Yeah, I feel like the joke's over.

We've squeezed as much juice

from the cockroach as we can, so let's give it a rest.

It's been like in the title of so many newsletters that I've gotten over the past 24 hours.

Yes.

It will not be in the title of this podcast unless we screw up.

But right, so Jamie Dimon on the JP Morgan Earnings Call used a very conventional metaphor.

Yeah.

When you see one cockroach, there are probably more.

He's talking about the first brands and tricolor, bankruptcies, failures.

Yeah.

Credit, bad things.

Kabooms.

Kabooms.

Actually, the real word that I love, and Mark Rowan said this, he said, It does not surprise me that we were seeing late cycle accidents.

Accident is what you call this.

Like the word for what happened with First Brands and Tricolor was accident.

Yeah.

Like you made some loans, you didn't get paid back.

Oops.

You spilled the milk, just not worth crying about it.

It's like accident is the term.

But yeah, so there have been some pretty big accidents in the credit space.

And one dumb thing that is happening is that there is a dispute about whether they exist in the private credit space or the public credit space.

Yeah.

Which I don't think is at all interesting.

No.

Like at all.

But like basically JB Diamond got on a call and it's like, oh, you should see the problems with private credit because these, you know, companies went bankrupt.

And then all the private credit guys were like, those are like publicly financed.

Banks led their deals.

Like those are not, and like, they're not like private credit, private credit.

They're not like direct loans from like the classic, they're not like LBO, you know, like the core of private credit.

Like, I don't know, they were funded by funds.

Like, are they private credit in some loose sense?

Sure.

Were some of them bank-led and like, you know, were there bonds?

Like, yeah, I don't know, whatever.

But the point is, it's not like JP Morgan making bank loans on his books, and it's not like core, you know, direct lending, private credit.

Yeah.

A funny detail in all of this is that Jamie Dimon didn't specifically call out private credit.

Yeah, although he did talk about like BDCs being

BDCs are private credit.

Yeah, I know.

But like, it's not like he said like, oh, these guys made bad loans, blah, blah, blah.

He did talk a little bit about, you know, BDCs trading at a discount to their NAV.

But I think it's just

the efficient markets way of saying they made bad loans.

Right, right, right.

But it did so happen that Mark Lipschultz of Blue Owl was asked about his comments and appears that he took them personally.

And that's where he told, of course, JP Morgan to look inwards and the banks to look inwards at their loans.

So it is this fun blame game that has played out this week.

I feel like we wouldn't be talking about it so much had Jamie Dimon not said cockroaches.

I feel like that gave

a good, like tangible illustration for us to all seize upon.

But it is like taking a step back, like it is the case that like

these accidents, as Mark Ryan called them, are like true like bubbly signs.

Yeah.

Like you don't make loans to like people who are double or triple or 100 times pledging their assets, which like there are some allegations, like no one really knows.

There's some allegations, Tricolor and or First Brands were maybe, you know, a little loose with collateral.

Yeah.

You don't make those loans unless you're really trying hard to make loans, right?

Like I wrote about, like, one thing that I think is interesting about First Brands is like the people who had a lot of exposure you know there's like this jeffries run fund there's this like trade finance origination platform they had like enormous amounts of exposure specifically to first brands like what does that mean it means like you're running a fund and you're like you know ideally you'd like to have diversified you know trade finance receivables or whatever but like

you just need to find paper to put into the fund.

And if someone is like, I'm going to generate a lot of paper for you, then like you would love to deal with that person, right?

Like you'd love to deal with the first brand if they're like, we can, you know, sell you as much as you need.

Yeah.

And so it creates incentives for people to sell you as much paper as you need, which means either becoming very over-levered to generate paper for you or just like writing fake paper or like, you know, triple pledging things so that they can like sell you more stuff because they sell you stuff and you give them money.

And like, that's, you know, that's the trade they're in.

So it does feel very...

toppy.

Yeah.

Like Mark Artin said, accidents, but also late cycle accidents.

And like, this is a private credit thing, but there's the credit generally these days.

Like, there's a lot of people going around being like, yeah, it feels toffee.

Yeah, we're going to keep doing it.

Yeah.

You know, I think one of the most insightful things ever said about finance was when Chuck Prince in 2007 said, as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance.

Like, that's what it is, man.

We all know we're coming to the end of the song.

Like, if you're in the business of making loans, you can't be like, we're not making loans.

Yeah.

Too many, like, loans are too frisky right now.

We're not going to do it.

You can't do that.

Yeah.

You got to dance.

Yeah.

Got to dance, even if it's late cycle and everyone's tired.

It is interesting.

I mean, this has been held up as an example of we are in a toppy environment.

So, too.

I said we weren't going to talk about Open AI, but the Open AI Walmart deal, that has been, a lot of hay has been made on social media about how truly we've reached the top.

There was like an FC article there where someone, like the headline and something like, of course it's a bubble.

Of course.

Here we are.

Everyone's like, yep, here we are in a bubble.

I do want to talk a little bit more about this other comment that Mark Lipschultz said, because it seems like he did take this very personally.

One of the things he said when it comes to market caps, there are people who have meaningful interests in the industry not continuing to grow and succeed.

Blackstone's market cap exceeds the market cap of most financial institutions in the world today.

It's not as if that's not coming from someone.

And of course, there are people who don't like it, which is interesting that he used Blackstone specifically and not Blue Owl.

But Blue Owl has a market cap of about $25 billion.

Blackstone is somewhere closer to $200 billion.

JPMorgan is over $800 billion.

But this is a point we've spoken about before is how the stock market values some of these private credit players, even though their assets are much smaller than like a traditional asset manager or even the asset management arms of these banks.

Yeah, although I think the point he's making is like when he says that that market cap has to be coming from somewhere, it's not like a comparison to the AUM of banks.

It's a comparison to like their lending business, right?

It's like, you know, I think he's making more broadly the point that like the business of making a lot of categories of loans is shifting from being a thing that banks

at least intermediate and underwrite to being a thing that is kind of being led and originated and held on the balance sheets of private credit firms.

Yeah.

Which again, I don't know how interesting it is to like debate about whether the problems you're seeing are like private credit problems or bank problems.

But like on the one hand, I think the private credit people make a good point.

Like, first of all, I say this a lot, but like the funding model of private credit is a lot more systemically stable than the funding model of banks, right?

Instead of having deposits, you have long-term equity capital.

That seems good.

The private credit people will also argue that like they have better underwriting incentives because they hold it on their books.

Banks obviously hold a lot of loans on their books, but you think about a lot of what they do is originate the distribute model where they maybe have less skin in the game on their underwriting.

On the other hand, things are regulated, and you do get the sense that it is such a good

fundraising environment for private credit firms, such a frothy, like if you want to sell your private credit firm, a lot of like traditional asset managers will buy it.

It's like

you do have some pressures to put all this gusher of money to work, and that might loosen your underwriting standards as well.

Can Can I say one more thing about cockroaches?

Sure.

By all means.

This is so gross.

Literal or?

Yeah, Jamie Dimon.

So, first of all, exactly what he said on the call was, my antenna goes up when things like this happens.

And my first reaction was like, an antenna like that on a cockroach?

You're saying he feels for the cockroaches.

Well, it's just.

He can put himself in the shoes of both the lender and the

shoes of the cockroaches.

Perhaps he tipped his hands there.

I don't know.

But cockroaches do have antennas, and so does Jamie Dimon, apparently.

Hi, I'm Kelly Cavanaro, Managing Director, Head of North America Institutional Distribution.

At Janice Henderson Investors, we believe working together is the way to work better, like combining your portfolio plans and our in-depth strategy, your valued assets, and our valuable insights, your mission, and our vision.

Working in harmony to seek the right investment opportunities.

Janice Henderson Investors, investing in a brighter future together.

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What's second on your priority list?

A Nobel Peace Prize.

Yeah, all right.

I didn't win again.

Well,

someone won the Nobel Peace Prize, but also the the insider trading prize.

But it wasn't insider trading.

Somebody won the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was Maria Carina Machado, a Venezuelan democracy activist.

And also somebody won an amount of money on Polymarket.

Some sum?

Yeah.

The sum appears to be at $50,000, which is like, depends on your...

I could find something to do with it.

It's not a bad payday for someone hanging out on Polymarket.

It's not like institutional grid.

You can't like run a hedge fund by like occasionally by once every year making fifty thousand dollars on the nobel peace prize winner but it's something right it's like it's true it's a nice individual person's payday but anyway there were some suggestions that it was insider trading because it was done kind of right before the announcement like in the in the you know hours leading up to the announcement and in fact a spokesman for the norwegian nobel institute said we've noticed that some have made significant financial gains by placing bets on this year's prize we will investigate whether this means that someone has unlawfully obtained information from us.

Because presumably they knew before they announced that, right?

Yeah.

And so if like someone in the circle of trust at the Norwegian Nobel Institute went and like placed an anonymous crypto trade on Polymarket then.

Which would have been amazing for what it's worth.

Oh yeah.

A real sign of the times.

Anyway.

A real sign of the times.

And then that's what they seem to have thought happened.

But it probably turns out one never knows because these things are all like somewhat anonymous.

But like, you know, there's an interview of the guy who like allegedly did it.

And he's like, you know, you can look to the, there's all this public stuff.

Basically, like when they hit the button on the announcement, like there's a lot of assets on the website.

Like there's a picture of Machado.

For sure.

And they upload those assets before they hit the button, before they like put out the actual press release.

And so if you're like scraping the folder on the website that has all the assets, you can see like, you know, something with her name in the webpage, and then you can make an informed bet.

And so that may be what happened here.

That is really funny.

Also, to your point, that 50 grand isn't institutional money, I have to imagine that next year this inefficiency in the market won't exist.

Like maybe they'll hit the button and then they'll upload the photo.

Yeah, there's some of this like, like this is a trade that occasionally exists in U.S.

public company earnings.

Yeah.

Because you can like, if you know like the URL of like last quarter's earnings, you can just like change Q2 to Q3 in that URL and just refresh that page until something pops up, which might be before they officially announce earnings.

Yeah.

And so this is like a well-known enough trade that companies are a little better about not doing that now.

So, right.

You think that like they will be a little bit more information secure next year?

Or they won't.

I don't know.

I mean, maybe they're not that bothered, but it just feels like that

body who actually like if you're the Nobel Institute and it turns out that some junior staffer was using your information to make 50 grand, you'll be annoyed with them.

If it turns out that someone on the committee that selects the winner was betting on it, then you'll be really annoyed.

It's super bad.

Because that's like

that.

That's not insider trading.

That's like, you know, market manipulation, right?

That's like rigging the game.

That's rigging the game.

It's like, instead of betting on who's going to win the Nobel Peace Prize, you're like giving the Nobel Peace Prize to the person you bet on.

It seems really, really bad.

No allegation that that happened.

But if it's just like someone scraped your website, like, who cares?

Give them the money.

Who cares?

That's a very

Kathy Wood out of

referencing, of course, last week's podcast and nothing else.

Right.

No, I know.

People talk about prediction markets.

You know, I've quoted Shane Copland saying it's like their goal is to help people understand and price the future.

And people really want prediction markets to create incentives to make the world more informed.

And so like the ideal is like, you know, you have a bet on like, will Russia invade Ukraine or whatever, right?

And like you have people who are really informed geopolitical analysts making bets.

And then you have like a Russian general making bets.

And then like you actually know, right?

And then like the market implied odds are really informative.

And so people can make economic decisions based on this like probability that exists in a prediction market.

Like that's kind of an interesting ideal and would be useful in a lot of purposes.

And, you know, as we've talked about here, the problem with that is like, it's not clear there is a lot of dumb money on like

the market of like, will Russia invade Ukraine?

And so it's hard to make a lot of money.

It's hard to be institutional grade.

And so like,

if you're a russian general you might be like no i can make ten thousand dollars and possibly be shot so i won't do it right so it's like it's like hard to incorporate information and then like you have examples like this where it's like whoever this is like put a lot of work into figuring out who was going to win the nobel prize 12 hours early and like one is that the sort of fact that will

inform anyone's economic decisions about like no one's hedging who's going to win the nobel prize right two is knowing it 12 hours early that useful

And then three, like the reaction might be that they just stop putting these assets on the web 12 hours early.

And then it's like, well, okay.

Yeah, the trade decisions.

You haven't made anyone more informed about anything in any useful way.

It's just like, yeah, you need some money.

Yeah.

Well, to that point, I mean, you write in your newsletter that the point is that the Nobel Peace Peace Peace...

Peace Prize prediction market is working the way it is supposed to.

In some broad sense, it incentivizes people to find out information and incorporate it into prices, which I agree with, but it feels kind of unsatisfying because you think about the example of, you know, equity markets and a hedge fund analyst scraping a website for earnings makes that market a little bit more efficient.

And then it informs how companies invest capital and allocate capital.

Whereas here, it's just someone now knows this early.

And like there's no follow-through on that, which is satisfying.

People care about who won the Nobel Prize, but it doesn't have like economic consequences.

They're not a lot of hedgers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But,

you know, this is like what I've said about sports gambling too, right?

It's like if you like create an ecosystem where people professional and like semi-professional and like just hardworking and smart people are dabbling in prediction markets,

then like there's possible spillover to like economically meaningful prediction markets, right?

There's some possibility that the people who spend eight hours building some scraping tools to predict the Nobel Peace Prize will then go on to spend 16 hours building scraping tools to predict the next Russian invasion, right?

Similar-ish skill sets, maybe.

Yeah.

Maybe.

Like maybe Russia is uploading its battle plans to a website.

Who knows?

There's some notion that if prediction markets get bigger and attract capital and skill, then ultimately the thing you really want, which is that they inform people about the probabilities of economically meaningful future events, There's some possibility that will come true.

And it's not like,

it's not in a straightforward, linear way where it's, we start with the most important markets and get really sophisticated people to do really good predictions of the most important markets.

It's we start with places where you can make money and then that attracts money and then that attracts more sophistication.

It probably also informs your behavior in other markets.

Like if the prediction market for who is Russia going to invade next gets really informative and liquid, and you could imagine watching that and then going and buying a bunch of calls on oil.

Oh, absolutely.

Although, I mean, right now, surely the oil market is more predictive of geopolitical events than

those prediction markets, but I don't know.

The frustrating thing about oil, it's my least favorite commodity to talk about.

It never prices in a sustainable risk premium.

So maybe you wouldn't buy calls on oil.

Or maybe you would, I don't know, buy treasuries.

Right.

This is one of the arguments for prediction markets.

There's a lot of ways to implement implement predictions about future geopolitical events.

And what that means is that you can't look at the price of oil or the price of treasuries and read out a prediction about future events because they kind of reflect a lot of different possible events.

Yeah.

Whereas if there's just like a contract, will Russia invade wherever?

Then you can look at that contract and read off the probability.

Yeah.

It's like very pure play.

Yeah, right.

Congratulations to whoever won 50 grand.

Yeah.

50 grand.

Probably less than the Nobel Peace Prize Prize.

How much is it?

I don't know.

You get a gold medal.

That's pretty good.

Yeah.

You also get the satisfaction.

Yeah, it's pretty good.

Yeah.

I feel like winning the Nobel Peace Prize is in some ways the worst prize.

Like, there's a decent chance that you're imprisoned or exiled.

That's true.

But in the event that you're not, imagine all the speaking engagements.

and fees that you can command.

That's okay.

That's fair.

That's fair.

Lucrative business winning a Nobel LLP's price.

Okay.

Well, a bunch of people are going to write in and tell you how much.

Yeah, of course.

It's a chunk of change.

I think.

Maybe it's not.

It's fun because we could Google it, but we're not going to do that.

Right.

Just idly watching.

Yeah, it's staring at me.

Hi, I'm Kelly Cavanyaro, Managing Director, Head of North America Institutional Distribution.

At Janice Henderson Investors, we believe working together is the way to work better, like combining your portfolio plans and our in-depth strategy, your valued assets and our valuable insights, your mission, and our vision.

Working in harmony to seek the right investment opportunities.

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we're up to 18.5 stock trading 18.5 baby but you know in 2026 eventually we'll get to 23 5.

there's a thing called the 24x exchange the 24 exchange 24x national exchange the intuition is that we want to trade stocks 24 hours a day but like you can't do that because you have to like restart the computers.

You do.

So their more modest target is trading stocks 23 hours a day, five days a week, And

their progress towards that is they launched 18 hour a day trading five days a week.

I feel like their name should be 23X.

No, that's the thing.

If you say 24, everyone's like, oh, 24, that's the number of hours in a day.

If you say 23, I feel like, what?

I know, but it's disingenuous.

Yes.

That's why it's funny.

Yeah.

But like, you know, you're allowed to be funny.

Anyway, though, but they're now up to 18 hours, which is like, you know, kind of like extended hours.

That's really all you need.

I don't know.

It's all I need.

as we've established, go to bed at six o'clock.

But

if you're, for instance, in Japan and you want to trade American stocks, it is convenient to be able to do it in the middle of your day.

Yeah, I guess.

Like it's a global market for American stocks and for stocks generally.

And so it does kind of make sense that everyone should be able to trade all the time.

Also, you know, maybe you're in Japan.

Maybe you're just up at three in the morning.

Right.

I try to be generous.

Like 24x Exchange actually says, you know, this is for, you know, investors worldwide.

And I don't really think that the paradigmatic user of 24-hour trading is someone drunk on their computer at 3 a.m.

But I kind of think that I think about that person a lot.

I think that's a fun.

Yeah.

I'm not going to do it justice.

There's a famous great bit in like hedge fund market wizards, the Jack Schwager book, where he interviews one hedge fund manager who says, I want to hire people who wake up early on Sunday morning and log in to poker sites to pick off the drunks coming home in another time zone.

Nice.

Because what you're doing there is understanding where you have the most edge and then just exploiting your edge and doing it somewhat inconveniently for yourself in a just cold-bloodedly rational way.

Anyway, right.

There's some people in a world of 24-hour trading who would come home drunk from the bar at 3 a.m.

and be like, all right, fire up Robin Hood.

Let's trade some options.

My single triple leveraged ETF now.

Yeah.

And again, I don't think that's the main use case for 24-hour trading, but it's the funniest use case.

Yeah.

Well, hopefully, you know, as this gets online, we'll figure out who exactly the players at 3 a.m.

Eastern are.

It might be Japanese retail players.

It might be people drunk coming home from the barn.

It might, I almost said barn.

I say that a lot more often than bar.

You come home from the barn more often than the barn.

Or it might be, you know, sophisticated U.S.

investors looking to pick off Japanese retail investors.

I don't know.

Well, yeah.

I mean, the other thing, like,

the thing that I think is interesting is we have this ecosystem where a lot of news gets disclosed outside of regular market hours

because you don't want to be, or traditionally, you don't want to be in the situation of disclosing a merger at 10 a.m.

and everyone reacting to that sequentially and like reading the press release and saying, ooh, I should buy the stock.

And some people not having gotten the press release yet and like selling at outdated prices.

It's just a mess.

And so what everyone does is they announce earnings at 7 a.m.

or 4.05 p.m.

So people have time to digest the earnings before the stock opens for trading next.

And the purpose of after-hours trading really is to let people react to news as it happens.

So instead of, you know, if a hurricane hits at midnight, instead of waiting until the next day to dump your stocks, you can dump your stocks at 12.01.

And when you say that, I think it's intuitively intuitively appealing to a lot of people.

Oh, I can trade as soon as the thing happens.

But I think it's like kind of bad for retail investors.

Yeah.

What it means is that instead of everyone reacting to news at the same time, because you have a buffer between when it's announced and when it can be traded, you have people reacting to news as they get it, as they analyze it.

And so you're going to have a lot of people trading at wrong prices.

And I do think that's the point.

or that's the appeal of after-hours trading is like you'll just get more volatility.

You'll get more wrong prices if you think you're skilled and you enjoy a gamble or a game of skill you'll have more opportunities to log on at nine o'clock and be like i know what this news means i'm gonna trade on it i actually wrote this week about the meme etf yeah the roundtable meme stock etf that was closed and then revived this week And, you know, it was revived at the very small, like the first day of trading at a very small.

It had like a thousand dollars, a couple hundred thousand dollars in it.

And it traded kind of normally during the day.

And then in the after-hour session, it shot up because, like, you know, there's a few retail investors who are buying it.

And the market makers all went home because it was after-hours trading in this tiny little ETF.

And so there's no arbitrage mechanism.

And so people are just buying it at crazy premiums to NAV, which should not happen in ETF, but does if no professionals are awake.

And I think if you have like more 24-hour trading, you're just going to have more trading where no professionals are awake and things trading at wrong prices.

And like people want to trade at wrong prices.

You're going to have uglier charts, basically.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you're ugly chart means someone like made a very bad trade and someone else made a very good trade.

Yeah.

Well, you touched on something that I think we've talked about before is like, okay, let's imagine a world where you do have 24 or 23 hour trading five days a week is whether or not you'd still get like these windows.

around the open and the close where everyone is sort of trained to trade the most.

I think you would because professionals have a rhythm to their day where they want to stop trading at the close, you know?

Yeah.

Not all, but like, you know, index funds.

It's clitting time.

Yeah.

Not even to go home, but because like you need a benchmark to mark against.

And then also just because of that like timing tradition, there is so much concentrated liquidity there.

And so if you're a huge investor who needs to move a lot of shares,

doing that at the close is really useful.

I do wonder, you know,

I've never fully understood how crypto closes work because crypto just sort of from day one is a 24-7 market.

And so

same with traditional currencies as well.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, there's no like close, right?

Yeah.

And like in stocks, there's very clearly a close and a lot of apparatus, you know, index funds and, you know, mutual fund withdrawals and redemptions and benchmarks and everything are all kind of organized around the close.

And if you did move to 24-7 trading, if you just did it in a natural, like non-path dependent way, you'd be like, well, when is the close?

But I don't think that's ever going to happen.

I think it's always going to the main exchanges will have a close at four.

And even if the main exchanges offer, you know, 17 hours of extended hours and everything is kind of technologically the same during the regular session and the extended session, I think there'll still be a close that everyone can point to and where a lot of liquidity will be concentrated.

Yeah, I feel that way too.

Like, I do struggle to imagine a world where this is the norm.

This is continuous 24-hour a day, like nothing, no close.

Yeah, I don't, that doesn't seem

like it goes against just the rhythm of being a human.

Yeah, it does.

Well, it goes against like the stock market's rhythm.

Yeah.

I mean, you say the rhythm of being a human, and I hear you, but like

you can buy on Amazon anytime you want, you know?

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, humans did make the stock market.

Right.

Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

No, right, right, right, right, right.

There is a human rhythm and there is a computer rhythm and like humans have become adapted to the computer and the stock market is from a time of you show up there and you leave to go have dinner right so quaint whereas like you know amazon is from a time of computers and you log in at midnight and buy something right and crypto is from a time of computers and so you log in at midnight and buy crypto yeah and i think that is creeping into the stock market but i think we're a long way from it entirely taking over the stock market i did want to point out one thing that you wrote which actually made me grateful for the environment that we live in right now.

You talk about how a decade ago, it was possible to think that investing would gradually become duller and more efficient and more automated, and that people would just let robots and professionals manage their retirement savings.

And basically, we wouldn't have any of the silliness that we do now.

That was like when I said it was possible to think that, like, I linked to something I wrote, kind of predicting that.

So that was dumb.

That's fine.

You called yourself out, but I occasionally get tired, as disgust.

We all get tired of the silliness and the headlines.

But I think that the world that you described sounds a lot more tiresome.

Well,

you say that as a person who goes on TV to talk about financial news every day for several hours.

Yeah, but you write about it.

Oh, yeah.

No, I agree.

I agree.

Like, all this dumb stuff,

you know, once every five times I write about meme stocks or crypto or whatever, I roll my eyes.

I'm like, I hate writing about this.

The other time I was like, wow, at least I have something to write about.

No, I agree.

I think as a person, as an investor, if you stopped thinking about meme stocks and like just, you know, had like robots perfectly invest your stock, like reasonably perfectly invest your stock and you didn't worry about it, you could spend more time like reading books.

Yeah, right.

Maybe.

Right?

Like, it's a better world, but it's worse for you know, making jokes in a financial newsletter.

That's true.

That's what we're all here for.

I have to go talk about all the silly things on the television.

How fun.

And the asteroid, if it hit yet.

Good luck with that.

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

I'm Matt Levine.

And I'm Katie Greifheld.

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 the close between 3 and 5 p.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 the air.

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

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

Our theme music was composed by Blake Maples.

Amy Keene is our executive producer.

And Sage Fauman 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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