The Diff

1 month ago | thediff.co | Byrne Hobart

In this issue:There's More Than One Efficient Market Paradox—Most apparent market inefficiencies have an explanation about market efficiency somewhere else, whether it's transaction costs, borrow costs, or even the cost of sourcing information. Which means that the more you believe the market is efficient, the harder it is to measure exactly what you mean by that. Reciprocal Tariffs—Part of fighting a trade war is admitting that you were already doing it.

1 month ago | thediff.co | Byrne Hobart

LongreadsDoidge, Karolyi, Shen, Stulz: why does the US have so few publicly-listed firms? In the late 90s, the US was widely seen as a nation of investors, with widespread equity ownership, pop culture references to the market, multiple news channels entirely devoted to stocks, etc. But now, relative to the size of its economy, the US has relatively few public companies.

1 month ago | thediff.co | Byrne Hobart

In this issue:AI's Impact on the Written Word is Vastly Overstated—LLMs are not the first time that the cost of producing text at a given quality level has dropped precipitously. Since we already live in a world where there's an effectively infinite amount of verbiage on any given topic, it won't be too big an adjustment to keep moving in that direction. In fact, it's a smaller media shift than the introduction of blogging and spellcheck.

2 months ago | thediff.co | Byrne Hobart

Don't Try to Build Another Berkshire Plus! Humans in the Loop; Humans in the Loop, Con't.; The Hardware/Software Burden; Custody; Unwinding a BubbleThis post is for paying subscribers only Subscribe now Already have an account? Sign inJoin 50,000+ industry professionals and curious generalists by subscribing to The Diff.

2 months ago | thediff.co | Byrne Hobart

In this issue:The New National Champions—The US has many big companies, but its biggest companies are smaller relative to GDP. Some of that is because the US has such a large economy and so many big companies are global, but there are also policy differences at work. And the policies in question are changing. Open Source AI—DeepSeek has shifted a lot of market value today, but its economic impact is different. Meme Private Credit—Does the Elon Premium apply to debt as well as equity?