KitchenFinances

Groening is back. On August 17th, Netflix released his new show Disenchantment. After binging this show over the past few days (solely for the sake of bringing new content to our blog), my feelings are mixed. As a huge fan of Futurama, when I saw Groening had made a new show I was stoked. I went in expecting a continuation of my most beloved show, something that Disenchantment definitely is not. At times it’s difficult to separate these shows from each other in your head, especially considering they use the same art style and some of the same voice actors, but by the end of the first season it’s hard not to see them as completely different universes. Despite their similarities, this show is very different from Futurama. Futurama is written on an episode by episode basis, with very little story progression or inter-episode plot. This works very well for the show, serving as a show that can be easily watched at any episode without trying to remember where we left off in the last. Di...

I'm back from vacation and Apple is an absolute wagon.  If you weren't paying attention, they just became the first company to hit one trillion dollars in market cap, which is just a ridiculous valuation.  They have been completely shit-pumping the tech sector and global markets in general since Jobs retook control in '97.  At that point the company was, according to Jobs, "90 days from bankruptcy".  Since then, they have risen to be the biggest company in the world by market cap. $AAPL financials read like they are fake.  The mountain of cash they have is infamous, sitting at 31.97B.  That is just cash on hand.  You take into account marketable securities and long term securities/overseas cash that pile grows to over 200 billion in cash.  Apple could outright buy companies like Disney, Netflix, Electronic Arts, and Tesla with cash.  Gross margins are increasing and they just beat on earnings.  They are looking strong, and this is su...

So for this first foray into writing about financial markets I will use this first article as a prologue. My opening scroll consists of things that I find interesting and things that I have spent the better half of 2 years learning deeply about from people far more wealthy and credentialed than me. However, the value I bring is I have digested this market information and I believe I understand it enough to relay it to the average person and in some ways talk to those who think they understand how our modern economy works. Many remember the movements that started up right around the 2007-2008 housing market bubble crash. We had Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party Movement. Both movements instinctively knew the system is rigged, its a pay to play system for the elite on Wall Street and in Washington DC. However along comes the 2016 presidential run and Donald Trump (then candidate, currently president) would talk about the economy as phony, that unemployment was really low because t...

McDonald’s seems to constantly come under fire, sometimes for reasons which seem wholly idiotic (Szechuan Sauce, anybody?) and other times by their own pitfalls (removing fries from Happy Meals, consequently turning them into Sad Meals). Most fast food chains are mired in controversy—which is simply the nature of the beast—but a new conundrum could prove severely detrimental to the Golden Arches. Adapting a fast food business model to yield maximum profits from picky millennials can be tricky, as more and more young adults stray away from Big Macs in lieu of healthier options. Besides a late night caviar for potheads, the slew of greasy options McDonald’s serves up doesn’t hold much worth as Mad Greens, Noodles and Company, Chipotle, etc. all gain larger niche footholds in our diets. However, burger joints took steps to adapt—in this case, the integration of salads into the McDonald’s menu in 2005 . This all seemed fine and well; although salads make up less than 3% of total reven...

Editor's Note: This is a guest blog from Ben Virgin, our twitter enemy/best friend. We reached out in an effort to diversify our content and takes because diversification is pretty much always a good thing. Enjoy. Ben Virgin 17 July 2018 George Bush Still Sucks Hello everyone.  My name is Ben, and the StockKitchen team approached me about writing a couple of short pieces for their blog.  I don’t have a cool kitchen nickname or anything, but I hope you enjoy my work. It seems like everyone who touches the Trump presidency falls victim to a tragic, Shakespearean end.  That is, people willing to attach their names to Trump to further some personal agenda usually get what they want, but at the cost of their dignity and humanity.  The most recent example I can think of is former EPA chief Scott Pruitt: he may have gotten away with cartoonish corruption , but at the very least he has had to resign and his name will forever be synonymous with cartoonish corr...

Welcome to the trashcan! Some of what I post may be absolute garbage, some may have some half decent insight. Regardless, feel free to comment, argue, or toss out any other trash you have. Stockitchen writers are huge fans of music, but no song catches us more than C.W. McCall’s, “Convoy”. Written by McCall and Chip Davis in 1975, nothing embodies trucking culture quite like “Convoy” does. Inspiring timeless trucker rebellion films such as the 1977 classic, Smokey and the Bandit. (If you haven’t seen it, it is a must watch).   via GIPHY There are some hilarious quotes you can pull from this song and use in your day to day life. I’m going to break it down for you right here: [CB radio chatter] CB or Citizen Band Radio was popular among truckers. They had a selection of 40 channels with which truckers would communicate with each other. During the 1973 oil crisis, the U.S. government imposed a nationwide 55 mph speed limit as causing a national fuel shortage....

The Net Externalities of Dogs and Cats A Stockitchen Economics Publication Abstract In today's pet market, there are two major players families choose from when purchasing.  We are talking about dogs and cats.  An ageless debate, right up their with Jordan and Lebron (respect Kobe's five).  In this study, I intend to analyze the qualitative economic externalities provided by in each of the dog and cat markets, and to propose policy solutions to move the market quantity and price closer to allocative efficiency, to better manage our resources.  I ignore minor pets, such as fish, reptiles, etc. because there third party impacts after an economic transaction are negligible and therefore needless to analyze.  So, in this paper, I will show that the dog market has a net positive externality and the the cat market a negative one, and propose how to fix these departures from allocative efficiency, decreasing market deadweight loss. Background To use net...