Matt Levine, 30 June 2021
A recurring theme of this column is that if you have the power to make the price of a financial asset go up, you should (1) do that but (2) buy a lot of it first. So for instance Tesla Inc. is a big company and its chief executive officer, Elon Musk, is a famous influential guy with a lot of Twitter followers. So when Tesla announced that it would start accepting Bitcoin as payment for its cars, the price of Bitcoin went up. This was very predictable. So what did Tesla do? It bought $1.5 billion of Bitcoin before announcing the news, and then Bitcoin went up and it had an immediate gain. 1
I am a simple man and to me this seems good. Buy a thing, create good news for the thing, announce that news, watch the price of the thing go up. In general I think it is under-utilized, as a strategy. You don’t hear stories about, like, Moderna Inc. running a successful trial of its coronavirus vaccine and buying a ton of call options on cruise lines and airlines before announcing the news. That would have been a good trade! Continue reading “Article: Amazon Got Some Warrants”
