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THE HEADLINES

 

FULLY VESTED

What’s the perfect piece of clothing for when your arms are warm, your torso is cold, and you’re ready to move size? You guessed it: the Patagonia vest.

Brads, Chads, and wanna-be Wall Street bros everywhere may have to search for a new uniform as Patagonia announced that it is cracking down on placing corporate logos on its vests through its corporate sales program.

Patagonia updated its mission statement last year to ‘We’re in business to save our home planet.’ In line with that mission, the crunchy clothiers intend to do business with more B-Corp companies, which are businesses that meet certain environmental and social standards and are focused on building a more inclusive and sustainable economy.

Don’t fret too much, as existing corporate customers will remain in its program and be able to order more branded gear. The company has not officially announced when these changes will go in place, but oil, mining, political organizations need not apply.

 

SILICON STREET

Goldman Sachs is going the way of Silicon Valley, minus the Allbirds, as it looks to expand its trading technology. The firm announced that it will begin offering a one-year program that will pay engineers $100k to design finance apps using the bank’s code.

The idea for the program came from Eric Schmidt of Google. Ever heard of it? This all appears to be part of Goldman’s master plan to become the [insert successful tech firm] of banking.

Goldman currently houses its proprietary SecDB trading engine on a web app called Marquee, available only to clients and sellers within the firm. Through this new “open door policy” the bulge bracket bank will give developers access to pricing engines and data feeds using GitHub. In other words, its available to jokers like you or I, if we happen to be jokers that know how to code.

In true Goldman fashion, not all of its code will be available to the plebes. Some will still be reserved for its clients. Baby steps.

OK, but why?

Over the past few years, Goldman, and Wall Street, in general, has been pushing into the world of open APIs for developers. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Spotify have been doing this for years in the tech space, and Amex used SAP Ariba’s API to help develop virtual cards for consumers.

This new direction is a change of pace for DJ D-Sol’s backup dancers, but it’s not 200 West’s first dip into the tech pool. Goldman’s online banking platform, Marcus, has procured more than $45B in deposits while issuing $5B in consumer loans since 2016. Oh, and let’s not forget the bank’s recent partnership to create the new Apple Card, which will undoubtedly be the new status symbol for anyone that isn’t quite “black card material.”

 

GTFO

Despite their uncanny resemblance (ok, so they’re both just old white dude), Carl Icahn apparently had no intention of pulling an Edward Smith (better known as Captain of the Titanic) and going down with the ship.

According to reports, Icahn sold his 2.7% stake in Lyft to George Soros ahead of its IPO last week. Icahn allegedly wanted out after disagreeing with the company’s plan to give its founders “supervoting” rights.

No word on how much Icahn Enterprises hawked the pre-IPO shares for but Soros’ stake would have been valued at roughly $550M at the ride-hailer’s IPO price.

But don’t feel too bad for Uncle Carl. Even if he did sell well below the IPO price (spoiler: he probably didn’t), he picked up his stake for just $100M.

Intelligent investor

Despite an oversubscribed IPO, an initial offering price of $72 (the high-end of the company’s range) and shares rising more than 20% in its first day on the public market (settling for +9%), Lyft has been more Snap than Facebook over its first few days of trading. Lyft closed around $70 yesterday and that comes after losing some 12% on Monday.

And it probably isn’t a great sign that Lyft has the masters of the universe betting against it. Case in point: short sellers, mostly hedge funds, have borrowed approximately $455M worth of Lyft shares (roughly 6.6M shares). Of course, short-selling an IPO isn’t unheard of, but Lyft’s failure to launch has only emboldened the sharks who are putting up massive fees for the opportunity.

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IN OTHER NEWS

• Just weeks after being released on bail while inexplicably dressed like a construction worker, Carlos Ghosn was arrested again in Tokyo on additional suspicions of financial misconduct. No word on if Ghosn woke up feeling dangerous.

 

• Now you see me, now you don’t. When you own the biggest online marketplace in the world, it makes sense that you would program searches to promote products that you make and sell above your competitors. At least, that’s what Amazon was doing until recently, when scrutiny over big tech companies unfairly promoting their own (other) business lines came down from Big Sister (read: Elizabeth Warren). Jeffery Commerce took note and is having his people quietly remove the obvious promos of Amazon’s Private Label goods.

 

• FFS, you guys. It’s complete anarchy in Facebook’s cybersecurity department, right now. 540M (not a typo) FB records that included account passwords were left unprotected on Amazon’s cloud servers and were readily available to the public.

 

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