Opening Bell: 11.8.17
Carl Icahn, the Car Guy: Why He Bets on Hertz, Lyft and Pep Boys (BBG)
Icahn imagines the next two decades or so of transportation the way a lot of experts do: Americans will ditch personal cars, opting instead for communal rideshares or short-term rentals, some of them self-driving and fueled by electricity. Icahn sees the migration playing Into his hands. He’s sure enough that he has invested more than $3 billion so far, not counting what he has put into Hertz.
Steven A. Cohen, Andreessen-Backed DIY Quant Fund Struggles (WSJ)
Quantopian gained attention by creating a network of 160,000 users who developed more than 600,000 trading algorithms, grabbing the early lead in an emerging area of do-it-yourself quant trading. But in the four months since it began trading on June 1, Quantopian’s traders have lost about 3%. Given that Quantopian has earned little revenue, it likely will need to raise more cash from investors, something executives hadn’t expected, the people say. About two months ago, Quantopian’s chief investment officer, industry veteran Jonathan Larkin, left the firm.
Inside the Dangerous World of Tiny IPOs (BBG)
Cary Hartline, 22, bought stock in ShiftPixy on the secondary market after coming across it on an investor online board. When the stock dropped 8 percent for no apparent reason, the Dallas social media manager started researching the company and discovered past history of some of the executives, he said. “I was completely blindsided,” said Hartline, who works at Cuddli, a self-described dating app for geeks. “I can’t believe these companies exist.”
Deutsche Bank chief hints at thousands of job losses (FT)
“We employ 97,000 people,” John Cryan told the Financial Times. “Most big peers have more like half that number.” Deutsche has made about 4,000 of the 9,000 job cuts promised under a five-year restructuring plan announced in late 2015. Mr Cryan said many of the additional cuts would come through using technology to boost efficiency in the bank’s processes. “There we’ve got the most to gain,” he said. “We’re too manual, which can make you error-prone and it makes you inefficient. There’s a lot of machine learning and mechanisation that we can do.”
Someone ‘Accidentally’ Locked Away $300M Worth of Other People's Ethereum Funds (Motherboard)
According to a blog post released by Parity on Tuesday, the code that fixed the July bug contained another vulnerability. That vulnerability allowed a user known as "devops199" on GitHub, a site for developers to collaborate on open source code, to allegedly accidentally trigger a function that turned the contract governing Parity multisignature wallets into a regular wallet address and made him or her the owner. Devops199 then killed this wallet contract, or, as Parity put it, "suicided" it. This made all multisignature wallets tied to that contract instantly useless, their funds locked away with no way to access them.
Wilbur Ross is probably just one of many billionaires who lie about being billionaires (Qz)
In a statement to Quartz, Forbes said that “There have been rare instances… in which people have blatantly lied to us in efforts to move their fortunes up or down.” But in a TV interview two years ago, Forbes editor Randall Lane suggested those instances weren’t so rare. “There’s a lot of lies,” he said. “Half lie higher and half lie lower.”
Consent required: Can professors exclude certain students from taking their classes? (Duke Chronicle)
“Anyone who is on the staff of The Chronicle [student newspaper] is not permitted to take this class.” Last Thursday, when I read that sentence out loud, I was met with audible gasps and bewildered looks from other members of The Chronicle staff. It came from the online version of a Spring 2017 syllabus for the course Economics 381S, “Inside Hedge Funds,” taught by [former Deutsche Bank director] Linsey Lebowitz Hughes, lecturing fellow of economics. Hughes has been teaching the course—which requires instructor consent—since at least 2014.
The Moral Identity of Homo Economicus (Project Syndicate)
According to moral psychology, our moral sentiments, on which Adam Smith wrote his other famous book, evolved to regulate behavior. We are the most cooperative species on earth because our feelings evolved to sustain cooperation, to put “us” before “me.” These feelings include guilt, shame, outrage, empathy, sympathy, dread, disgust, and a whole cocktail of other sentiments. We reject offers in the ultimatum game because we feel they are unfair.
Groom-to-be gets shot in the penis by celebratory gunfire the night before his wedding in Egypt (Daily Mail)
An Egyptian man has been left seriously injured on the day of his wedding after he was accidentally shot in the genitals during his stag do. The 28-year-old, named only as Osman Al-A., was enjoying his last night as an unmarried man when one of the guests fired a weapon in celebration. The groom-to-be was hit in the penis, thigh and hand, and was taken to hospital with serious injuries.