🍋 Wall Street's All In On Psychedelics

Good Morning! New York’s largest ever office-to-condo project is ready to welcome its first residents next month at One Wall Street. The city’s first ever indoor pickleball courts opened at LifeTime Sky in Hell’s Kitchen last week.

Google is requiring its employees to swap desks with their colleagues and alternate days in-office as the company reduces its real estate footprint.

And SBF was hit with four new criminal charges yesterday, and the indictment quotes an unnamed executive explaining how the FTX CEO funded “woke sh*t for transactional purposes.”

1. Story of the Day: Wall Street’s All In on Psychedelics

Private equity and venture capital firms from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are pumping millions of dollars into the psychedelic revolution. Investors are betting on the power of mind-bending drugs to transform mental health treatment and cut costs.

The FDA is gearing up to approve the use of MDMA and psilocybin for therapeutic treatments over the next few years and, the potential benefits are hard to ignore. Plus, with faster onset and offset times than current treatments, these drugs could be the key to bringing psychedelic therapy to the masses.

The finance world is buzzing with excitement over psychedelics, but it's not just the stock market that's in need of a little mood boost. With over 150 million Americans living in areas with a mental health worker shortage, it's clear that our country is in dire need of a solution. Thankfully, a new era of psychedelic drugs is on the horizon, offering effective treatments without the need for a magic carpet ride. It's time to take mental health seriously, and these innovative treatments could be the answer we've been looking for.

Takeaway: Don't let the selloff in biotech stocks last year dull your enthusiasm - this is a game-changer for mental health. And some psychedelic drug startups admit lower valuations have made investing even more attractive for investors.

2. Markets Rundown

Stocks snapped a losing streak as more earnings come in.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) NVIDIA ($NVDA) +14% after posting positive earnings, bullish outlook on AI.

• (–) Lordstown Motors ($RIDE) -11% after the EV maker announced a recall.

• (–) Domino’s Pizza ($DPZ) -12% after weak demand and earnings, persistent delivery problems.

Private Dealmaking

• Apollo Global Management in talks to invest $750 million in Credit Suisse’s spinoff of First Boston

• Chain Reaction, an Israeli semiconductor company, raised $70 million

• Descope, a user management platform, raised $53 million

• Buk, a Latin American HR software company, raised $35 million

• GrainChain, an agricultural blockchain startup, raised $29 million

• Piliant, a B2B credit card startup, raised $28 million

3. Top Reads

• Meet the $10,000 Nvidia chip powering the race for AI (CNBC)

• How NYC’s Second Avenue Subway became the world’s most expensive line (BB)

• Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge (Wired)

• Americans have a collective $21 billion in unspent gift cards (CNN)

• The job market for remote workers is shrinking (WSJ)

• Corporate America’s profit rocket hits headwinds (Axios)

• U.S. regulators warn banks to be on alert for crypto-related liquidity risks (Reuters)

• Netflix cutting prices in some countries amidst high competition (YF)

• New indictment shows how SBF’s political influence worked (Vox)

• Why trash stocks are up (YF)

4. Book of the Day: Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education

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As endowments and fundraising campaigns have skyrocketed in recent decades, critics have attacked higher education for steeply increasing its production cost and price and the snowballing debt of students. In Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education, Bruce A. Kimball and Sarah M. Iler reveal how these trends began 150 years ago and why they have intensified in recent decades.

In the late nineteenth century, American colleges and universities began fiercely competing to expand their revenue, wealth, and production cost in order to increase their quality and prestige and serve the soaring number of students.

From that era through today, the rising wealth and cost of higher education have continued to reinforce each other and spiral upward, increasing the heavily subsidized price paid by students.

Kimball and Iler explain the strategy and reasoning that drove this wealth-cost double helix, the new tactics in fundraising and endowment investing that fueled it, and economists' efforts to understand it.

Using extensive archival, documentary, and quantitative research, Kimball and Iler trace the shifting public perception of higher education and its correlation with rising costs, stagnating wages, and explosive student debt.

They show how stratification of wealth in higher education became tightly interwoven with wealth inequality in American society. This relationship raises fundamental questions about equity in US higher education and its contribution to social mobility and democracy.

“If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

• How to unlock compound growth in your life

• The three words that are taking over LinkedIn

• 13 life-changing books you can finish in a day

• 5 habits to upgrade your mind

• The question to ask yourself 100 times a day to be successful

6. Daily Visual: Asset Allocations for Endowment Cohorts

_{Source: 2022 NACUBO-TIAA Study of Endowments}

7. Daily Acumen

Sleepovers:

"Sleepovers provide an experience, like trick-or-treating, when the power balance between grown-ups and children can shift in the latter’s favor for the simple reason that parents don’t have the stamina to keep up with (or even stay awake for) kids’ antics.

Feeling powerful can be energizing and, well, empowering. But an even more potent benefit is the chance to learn deeply from other families.

I found it incredibly exciting to be a voyeur in another family’s home. Some families ran a tight ship; others had dishes piled high in the sink.

Some parents were fun to talk with; others scared me witless. Some families seemed to be thriving; others were just hanging on. Seeing these differences helped me reflect on my own place in the world."

Source: The Atlantic

8. Memes of the Day

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