Eli Qian

51 followers · 69 following · 4283 views

on the atlas — 508

highlights — 3418

All of this is also social. Reddit forums and Discord servers act as digital commons, replacing the sense of civic belonging that once came from churches or neighborhoods. People find identity through participation—they may lose money, but they gain a kind of cohesion.
Why My Generation Is Turning to ‘Financial Nihilism’ - WSJ
To be clear, traditional stocks still account for the majority of invested dollars—that’s growing too. According to JP Morgan Chase, almost 40% of 25-year-olds have invested in traditional markets in 2024, compared to 6% in 2015. But even then, the fastest-growing areas of participation are the more speculative markets.
Why My Generation Is Turning to ‘Financial Nihilism’ - WSJ
toward the few places where a real upside still appears possible
Why My Generation Is Turning to ‘Financial Nihilism’ - WSJ
But the postwar idea of upward mobility was always contingent on certain fundamentals: strong institutions, affordable education, accessible homeownership and stable work. Now those conditions are buckling.
Why My Generation Is Turning to ‘Financial Nihilism’ - WSJ
the economic system no longer rewards prudence or long-term planning
Why My Generation Is Turning to ‘Financial Nihilism’ - WSJ
But this misunderstands the mindsets of today’s young people. What seems like recklessness to parents and grandparents is actually a worrisome form of economic adaptation.
Why My Generation Is Turning to ‘Financial Nihilism’ - WSJ
The genie isn’t going back in the bottle
The Takeaway: Sports Betting Will Not Cause The End Of Western Civilization
Online sports betting has existed in much of the world before the fall of the federal ban here, and the world didn’t collapse upon itself
The Takeaway: Sports Betting Will Not Cause The End Of Western Civilization
Why it works: It’s a volume game. If you have $100M in deposits, renting a charter is fine. If you have $10B in deposits, the "Rent" you pay to your partner bank (in lost Net Interest Margin) and payment fees is astronomical.
🧠 Banks are not disrupted.
They have taken the "Lending" function of the bank and moved it to a balance sheet that is actually designed to hold it.
🧠 Banks are not disrupted.
Shadow banks win because they don’t have the "Conglomerate Tax." They don't have to balance a safe deposit base with a risky lending book.
🧠 Banks are not disrupted.
There is a 21st century playbook for becoming an industrial power and China has written it.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
It doesn’t have to become China; but it should better study China’s successes.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
agreed to the trial lease of four aircraft and three spare engines for … one dollar.
How Airbus took off - Works in Progress Magazine
Airbus did everything it could to deemphasize its European heritage as it toured the US.
How Airbus took off - Works in Progress Magazine
the Airbus team were seized by the need to build a jet that airliners would want to buy. They didn’t have much choice: if they failed, there was a reasonable chance the consortium’s domestic aerospace suppliers would collapse.
How Airbus took off - Works in Progress Magazine
That’s the real bummer about the casino economy. No one wants it.
Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy - by kyla scanlon
We ran this big experiment - can people have unlimited and unregulated access to millions of things that can make them lose their mind - and the answer is no, not really, it cooks the population like an egg.
Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy - by kyla scanlon
For most of human history, literacy was scarce and attention was abundant. People were what we would call “bored” most of the time, outside of work. Today, it’s the opposite - literacy is collapsing, attention is a commodity, and people are completely overloaded.
Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy - by kyla scanlon
In the 20th century, we solved Baumol, sort of, by socializing or heavily subsidizing these sectors with those public schools, public libraries, state universities with low tuition, public hospitals. We made the expensive, low-productivity stuff cheaper through policy. But we’re now privatizing (or destroying or redtaping) these sectors at the exact moment we shouldn’t be. We’re asking households to absorb costs that used to be socialized. Is it any wonder that the middle class feels squeezed?
Everyone is Gambling and No One is Happy - by kyla scanlon
Success is very intoxicating. It is very difficult to handle all the fame and adulation. It corrupts you. You start to believe that everybody around you is in awe of you, that everybody wants you, and that everybody is thinking of you all the time
Two Kites Dancing In A Hurricane - by 0xsmac
Behind secret door number four is a path that doesn't get enough attention: the Fed's "skinny payment account." It proposes a world where an institution can access the Fed's payment rails (FedNow, Fedwire) without the requirement to lend or the safety net of the Discount Window.
🧠 Everyone wants to be a bank
n the partner model, every UI change or T&C update sits in a compliance queue for weeks
🧠 Everyone wants to be a bank
The 'Sponsor Bank' model was built on a dangerous arbitrage: massive, complex Fintechs hiding behind the balance sheets of tiny, state-chartered community banks that often lacked the resources to police them. By granting direct charters, regulators are closing that loophole. They are effectively telling Fintechs: 'Come out from behind the curtain.' Direct supervision by the OCC or the Fed trades the opacity of the partner model for the transparency of federal oversight.
🧠 Everyone wants to be a bank
companies went to lengths to prove they're not actually lenders or banks.
🧠 Everyone wants to be a bank
Fintech institutions will now be subject to the highest levels of oversight and safeguarding
🧠 Everyone wants to be a bank
More companies have applied for OCC banking charters in the past 6 months than I can remember
🧠 Everyone wants to be a bank
In their first year all the class of 21 companies also showed losses, but generally showed much higher revenue growth
The 2025 IPOs are 4 years late - by Andrew M. Dresner
the main difference between the class of 2021 and the class of 2025 is profitability
The 2025 IPOs are 4 years late - by Andrew M. Dresner
After the 2010 China–Japan dispute, for example, rare earth prices rose sharply, with some estimates suggesting a 10-fold increase. Tokyo diversified suppliers and built permanent capacity through public–private partnerships and overseas investments
The Burn and the Choke: Why Semiconductor Controls Will Outlast China’s Rare Earth Weapon
Why hasn’t the federal government built a technological specimen as sublime as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Hoover Dam, or the Apollo missions?
2025 letter | Dan Wang
Chinese and Americans are the most alike people in the world.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
it’s up to the US and Europe to show that they can hold on to their values while absorbing the technological changes coming their way.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
He is building Fortress China stone by stone in order to outlast the adversary.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
While Chinese universities have grown more capable at producing new ideas, it’s not clear that the American manufacturing base has grown stronger at commercializing new inventions.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
American scientists may be world leaders in dreaming up new ideas. But American manufacturers have been poor at building industries around these ideas.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
Third, western elites keep holding on to a distinction between “innovation,” which is mostly the remit of the west, and “scaling,” which they accept that China can do. I want to dissolve that distinction. Chinese workers innovate every day on the factory floor.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
I would argue that China embodies both greater capitalist competition and greater capitalist excess than America does today
2025 letter | Dan Wang
Probably the most underrated part of the Chinese system is the ferocity of market competition.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
I think the US continues to systematically underrate China’s industrial progress
2025 letter | Dan Wang
The Communist Party lives for whole-of-society efforts.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
The AI labs have not shown that they’re thinking seriously about how to diffuse the technology throughout society
2025 letter | Dan Wang
Beijing is building so much solar, coal, and nuclear to make sure that no data center shall be in want.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
It also forces thinking to be obsessively short term. People start losing interest in problems of the next five or ten years, because superintelligence will have already changed everything.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
It’s a Pascal’s Wager, in which we’re sure that the values are infinite, but we don’t know in which direction.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
Portfolio managers want to be right on average, but everyone is wrong three times a day before breakfast. So they relentlessly seek new information sources; consensus is rare, since there are always contrarians betting against the rest of the market.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
Coverage of Silicon Valley increasingly reminds me of coverage of China, where a legacy media reporter might parachute in, write a dispatch on something that looks deranged, and leave without moving past caricature.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
The cost of a stop-loss, aside from slippage and transaction fees, is sometimes cutting eventual winners.
stop with the stop-loss debate - by Kris Abdelmessih
What’s the R^2 of my own actions on my results? Maybe 0.3? I can give credit to myself for some consistent hard work and curiosity. But I can’t give myself credit for the results.
Mostly Beta - by Andrew Courtney - Whirligig Bear
The role of that community is not random however, these were individuals chosen because of their skill in communication, teaching, and given incentives to do those things. The structure of a firm and the people there is deliberate, and designing this structure is an especially impactful and difficult role.
Mostly Beta - by Andrew Courtney - Whirligig Bear