Tale of the Tape

Good evening folks and welcome to the Tuesday edition of the Daily Rip. Today, stocks fell if you can believe it 😱

The S&P 500 dropped .8% for its first down day in August.

Tech took it on the chin again while small caps and financials outperformed for the third straight day.

Precious metals and Crypto took it bad with Gold down 5%, Silver down 13%, and Bitcoin down 4%. It’s wild metals and crypto sync. Check out this year-to-date chart of $BTC.X, $GLD, and $SLV:

Seems like people are buying into the narrative that Bitcoin is a store of value play. 

Just for kicks, here’s some stock that especially sucked today. Zoom dropped the line down 7.6%. AMD got chipped, losing 6.5%. Moderna coughed up 4.2% and Biogen hocked a lung down 3.4% on the Russian vaccine news. Netflix bombed down 3.5%. Tesla sputtered down 3%. Clorox got whitewashed down 5%. Newmont caved down 7%. Etc etc…

Here’s your closing prices on the major equity indices:

S&P 500	3,306	+0.36%
Nasdaq	10,941	+0.35%
Russell 2000	1,517	+0.69%
Dow Jones	26,828	+0.62%

Splitting in Style

Tesla announced a 5 for 1 stock split.

Tesla just announced that it will split its stock 5 for 1. This comes on the heels of Apple announcing a 4 for 1 split a couple weeks ago.

This will make the stock easier for smaller investors to accumulate and trade.

$TSLA looks up 6% after hours on this news. It’s up 228% YTD. Incredible.

Here’s Nasdaq’s Chief Economist Phil Mackintosh explaining why stock splits make sense for these companies trading with high share prices. 

Lumber Grows to the Sky

Lumber futures have gone vertical in the last few weeks. Maybe this is a reflection of the spike in home sales but who knows.

Lumber futures have gained over 150% since the April bottom. It’s an all-time high. 

Here’s the weekly chart. Wowza 👀

Airbnb IPO

Airbnb plans to file with the SEC later this month in hopes of going public by the end of 2020. 

Plans for an IPO earlier this year were kiboshed as COVID hit and the company laid off 25% of its workforce.

The company raised $2 billion in equity and debt to help make it through the pandemic.

It’s a confidential filing, which means the company is going to limit access to privileged share information. What a crock. Better than lying we guess. 

The company went from darling to duckling when this whole pandemic disaster broke and it seems like they have a pretty tough road ahead.

It Happened.

The BIG10 postponed its college football season and hinted at potentially playing in the Spring. Who knows how many conferences will join in this decision but it blows. 

Here’s more from CBS Sports.

And this just in… the Pac-12 announcing all sports postponed throughout the fall and winter. That was quick.

COVID Speeding the Death of Universities

With remote communications tech and subscription education business models ascending, it was only a matter of time before the decline of our nation’s universities began for real.

The trend is accelerating due to COVID which is just as well. 

There’s an element of karma because the greedy bastards have raised tuition well in excess of inflation forever and helped drive those they’ve sworn to educate deeper into debt.

20% of Harvard Freshmen has deferred for September. And that’s one of the nation’s top schools. 

Kids can take Python or basically anything online now and they can become engineers before paying a penny with programs like Lambda School.

So before peeps shell $30k per annum or take that student loan, more and more, they’ll be taking some time to think about what they want to do and then researching how they might be able to do it more cost-efficiently.

Maybe soon, Amazon will turn those vaunted old lecture halls into fulfillment centers the way they’re doing with the JC Penneys.

Let ‘em burn. 🔥🔥🔥

Earnings Tomorrow

Be sure to know when your stocks report earnings. Here’s the full earnings calendar.

Links That Don’t Suck

🌌 ST After-Hours: Russia Cures Covid ~ Spotify | Apple 

🪐 Dwarf Planet Ceres is Geologically Alive 

🛹 Evan Smith’s “Modern Frequency” Part

🎮 Microsoft’s New Xbox Launches in Nov., Halo Infinite delayed to 2021

🚫 New York Comic Con is Canceled 

🔥 Flirting with Models: Cliff Asness

🏌 PGA Championship 2020