finance - Justin Paterno

How to raise money by selling NFT's of paperclips and bananas

In the last decade of tech blogging there's everything else that has been written, and then there is what Chris Dixon has written. I can't think of another person who has such a great hit rate both in prescience and memorability. Yesterday he wrote "NFTs and a Thousand True Fans"

finance

Clapping Through It

Today's the one year anniversary of one of the more surreal moments of my life. A year ago, I was at Stocktwits and we rang the opening bell of the Nasdaq. When you ring the bell you have to clap and scream and smile and be excited for like 2

game design

Format Replacement cycles

Something interesting is underway. Over the past month, NBA Top Shot, a digital collectable similar to a basketball card has exploded in interest and in price. My friend Michael Batnick just wrote a great post about diving into the mania head first. With Top Shot, instead of a physical card

finance

Cardboard Picassos

A couple weeks ago, two 1986-87 Fleer Michael Jordan Rookie Cards sold for $738,000 each. That's a high number, but not nearly as high as a Mike Trout rookie sold for auction this summer. Prices like this, against a larger uptrend in sports card, immediately arise suspicions and usher

finance

Bitcoin is the new Buyback

Earlier this week $TSLA announced that it bought $1.5B worth of Bitcoin. Since then other companies, including $TWTR and $UBER have made some noise about purchasing some, and others have speculated about $AAPL or $AMZN purchasing some. One event does not a make a trend, and Elon Musk is,

finance

Gas Prices, Currencies, and Enabling Economies to Scale

If you've been following Ethereum at all you will see that Gas is Too Damn High. Gas prices, or the fee miners charge to use the Ethereum network has been at an elevated level since mid-summer, as DeFi and general speculation is driving more activity on the blockchain. Ethereum charges

game design

GameStop and Bartle Player Types

I've written in the past that I'm very interested in Game Design as a lens for Product Design and a trend we will see really catch on in the coming years. Now that it's mostly over I thought it would be fun to look at the GameStop trade under such

finance

PFOF is the Ad Model for Brokerage

Lots has been said about the business of Payment for Order Flow over the past five years, and even more has been discussed in the past week as Robinhood has come under fire once again. PFOF has become one of the businesses of the retail brokerage, and very much the

finance

The Billion Dollar Cartridge

Tomorrow a bunch of younger investors are going to put a quarter of a million dollars into a dinosaur. I'm not talking about GameStop, rather it's the latest offering on Rally Road - a platform that fractionalizes and securitizes ownership of collectibles. Here's a tweet from Rob, their founder (who

finance

Organized Noise

In market microstructure, noise traders are traditionally participants who when interacting with a market maker do not (or "should" not) inform prices at all. Traditionally retail investors would fit this category - hence lots of the "LOL" happening around $GME (and this morning, $AMC). On the other hand, informed traders

finance

On Conway's Law and Social Financial Media

Every now and then a stock market story comes around that captures the attention of the nation. Yesterday, we were blessed with such a story as short squeeze on all but left for dead video game retailer, Gamestop ($GME), led the stock to astronomical levels. The stock is up 350%

tech

Fear and Loathing in Crypto

“There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil." -Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las VegasAs Bitcoin reaches new all

finance

Coinbase, Facebook, and Why Values are What Really Matters

This week Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong, published a Medium post reaffirming its mission to "create an open financial system for the world" and announcing that Coinbase would not be a politically active company, except where it helped further this mission. He writes (emphasis his), Coinbase’s mission is to create

finance

The Stock Market Game

As I've been furnishing my home office, I've been picking out cool stuff to hang on the walls. One item I came across is this patent from 1950 for a Stock Market Game, filed by Parker Brothers. I had never heard of it but it looks like this game did