Retail investors get free trades because wholesale market makers pay retail brokers for the privilege of trading with their customers’ orders, which means that the retail brokers can make lots of money without charging commissions. They get good execution because it is very pleasant for those…

Elon Musk is becoming a leading figure in American mergers and acquisitions. This week he agreed to buy Twitter Inc. in what will probably be the largest leveraged buyout ever done by a guy in his personal account. In 2018 he spent a week pretending he was going to take Tesla Inc. private, in what…

Well that was weird. On Tuesday I wrote a column saying it was unlikely that Elon Musk will buy Twitter Inc. On Wednesday I left on a family vacation. On Thursday, for my sins, Elon Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash. 420 is a weed joke. I suppose this increased…

A model of corporate finance that I like and find helpful goes like this: 1. A company is founded to do a thing. 2. It raises money from investors to do the thing. 3. It spends the money to do the thing. 4. It does the thing profitably, which generates money. 5. It gives some of the money…

I have probably spent as much time as anyone on earth making fun of WeWork, so now, for variety, I think I am going to pivot to being a wild-eyed WeWork bull. To be fair, I have always had sort of a soft spot for the business model. The business model is, like, you rent a building, you divide it…

Vaccine Profits Oh man I feel like I need to go down to Congress and explain some stuff: Executives from four companies in the race to produce a coronavirus vaccine — AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna Therapeutics and Pfizer — told lawmakers on Tuesday that they are optimistic their…

The most interesting correlation in the stock market right now is the one between (1) the prices of airline stocks and (2) the amount of antibodies produced by coronavirus vaccine candidates in clinical trials. So far the vaccines are experimental and uncertain. If you knew that they’d work really…

Apparently Facebook Inc. will pay a $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission for doing some bad privacy stuff, and will agree to take some steps to stop doing so much bad privacy stuff in the future. (There’ll be a committee.) The settlement is not official yet but has been pretty well…