🍋 A Christmas Miracle

Author

Short Squeez
December 24, 2021

Together With

"A Christmas miracle is when your family doesn’t get into a single argument all day." – Melanie White

Merry Xmas from the S&P 500, which hit its 68th record close of the year, after a turbulent af last month. The market is also closed today which ensures that we end Christmas on a high, LFG. While Amazon workers have been spending day & night in the warehouse, Jeff Bezos has been grinding it out in his local Planet Fitness, bulking up for the holiday szn. Elsewhere, Jared Kushner, politician turned private equity guru, has raised more than $3 billion in committed funding for his investment firm, Affinity Partners.

For Christmas, all we ask is to share Short Squeez with one person you think will enjoy reading it. Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas 🎄!

1. Story of the Day: A Christmas Miracle

Toys 'R' Us has come back from the dead and opened its first store in the US after going bankrupt in 2017 and closing 735 stores.

The first new store is in a 20,000 sq ft space in the American Dream Mall in East Rutherford, New Jersey. There was a ribbon-cutting and cake, and more than 100 people waited in a line that stretched to Wetzel’s Pretzels. It also has a cafĂ© and ice cream parlor that will open in 2022.

Toys "R" Us' collapse was painful not only for its customers but also for its 30,000+ employees, who lost their jobs. The company became a case study in private equity deals gone wrong as it levered TF up and eventually went bankrupt.

In 2019, it tried to make a comeback with two stores in New Jersey and Texas but Covid derailed its plans and it closed the stores in January 2021.

The brand is owned by WHP Global and has more than 900 stores internationally and a digital presence of its own and through Macy’s website. 

Toys 'R' Us has reached an agreement with Macy's and will soon start rolling out 400 Toys 'R' Us stores inside Macy’s locations to “significantly expand our footprint” with children.

Short Squeez Takeaway: Toys 'R' Us is hoping that the brand's nostalgia will attract visitors back to stores. It definitely won't be an easy task with everyone shopping online these days. Let's hope Toys 'R' Us has learned its lessons and its second coming will be less painful than its first life. We don't plan on shopping there any time soon but ngl it is nice to have the store back just in time for Christmas.

Source: NYT

2. Markets Rundown

US stocks had a record day ahead of the long Christmas holiday weekend, on optimism that the omicron variant won't derail the global economy.

Movers & Shakers

  • (+) Nikola ($NKLA) +18% a day after the company announced on Twitter that its first customer delivery is done and signaled there’s more to come.

  • (+) Stitch Fix ($SFIX) +8% after one of its shareholders, Working Capital Advisors, disclosed that it purchased more shares in the company.

  • (–) Crocs ($CROX) -12% after the footwear maker announced it would buy privately held rival Heydude for $2.5 billion.

3. Top Reads

  • Where to find cheaper alternatives to expensive Stocks (BB)

  • 5 important things to do before the market bubble bursts (BVI)

  • Biden says he wishes he thought about ordering 500 million at-home Covid tests 2 months ago (CNBC)

  • Dermatologist says patient care suffered after private equity-backed firm bought her practice (NBC)

  • Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3 (OR)

  • How TikTok inundates teens with eating-disorder videos (WSJ)

  • Crocs CEO defends $2.5 billion Heydude acquisition as shares tumble (CNBC)

  • Wall Street grapples with return-to-office conundrum as Omicron explodes (Reuters)

A Message from Daloopa: Let AI Do Your Financial Modeling

Here's a dirty secret: part of being a finance professional (investment banker, private equity / hedge fund investor) consists of being one of the world's best-paid data-entry professionals. It's a pain—and a rite of passage—to build a financial model by painstakingly transcribing information from 10-Qs, 10-Ks, presentations, and transcripts. Or, at least, it was: Daloopa uses machine learning and human validation to automatically parse financial statements and other disclosures, creating a continuously-updated, detailed, and accurate model.

If you've ever fired up Excel at 8pm and realized you'll be doing CTRL C Alt-Tab Alt ESV until well past midnight, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

4. Book of the Day: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.

Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse.

The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management.

Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society―and that we could do things differently.

“It’s about moving through the world with curiosity about what will happen next, instead of a demand that it turn out according to your plans.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

  • Join the 50k other investors bout to invest in VC with Sweater Ventures, the first VC fund for the retail investor

  • The system I used when picking a new place to live

  • Inside AMC’s crazy, bonkers, upside-down year of apes, memes and shorts

  • Britney Spears felt trapped. Her business manager benefited

6. Daily Visual: Savings Dwindle Among Lower Earners

Share of adults unable to cover one month's expenses with savings

Source: Axios

7. Daily Acumen: Hanlon's Razor

Hanlon’s razor is the adage that you should “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. If you are evaluating people's actions, you must not assume that they acted with the intention of causing harm, as long as there is a reasonable alternative explanation.

In other words, Hanlon's razor means that you shouldn't assume a person in charge of an event simply forgot to send you a notice if they forget to do so in a reasonable amount of time. Say you don't receive a notice about an important event at work, Hanlon's razor says that you shouldn't assume that this is because they dislike you because that's probably not the case.

8. Crypto Corner

9. Memes of the Day

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