Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. We're starting with light fair you know, yeah, but lightly fried, well probably deeply fried, lightly breaded, deeply fried.
All right, Hello and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast. You're a weekly podcast where we talk about stuff related to money. I'm Matt Levine and I write the Money Stuff column for Bloomberg Opinion.
And I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an anchor for Bloomberg Television.
What do we got today, Katy?
We're going to talk about shrimp and lobsters, all the fair out of the sea. We're going to talk about fat fingers and why City Group keeps having problems with those, and then we're going to talk about brains.
It's going to be a good one.
Yeah, Red Lobster, did they really shrimp themselves to death?
No? Maybe a little bit.
But isn't it fun to pretend?
It's more fun to pretend than almost any other thing I've pretended about. So Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy over the weekend. And why did they go bankrupt? Well, you know, they like had a series of business mistakes. That's some onerous leases that they got in connection with the leverage via changing consumer tastes. Inflation is rough and fast, casual.
Dining, those are all boring.
Yeah. No, the real answer is that they are. Their equity owner is a company that is also one of their big suppliers. It's a seafood company called Tai Union, and Red Lobster under its former CEO, embarked on an unlimited, endless shrimp promotion where for twenty dollars you can get
all the shrimp you wanted, all the time. And in the bankruptcy papers, the new CEO kind of like works on behalf of the creditors sort of insinuates that there is a scheme to pump shrimp through Red Lobster to make money for Tie Union at the expense of Red Lobster.
To just line the pockets of Thai Union. Well, it did turn into they were the only shrimp supplier for Red Lobster, didn't They start out with three and then it whittled down to just Tai Union.
It's not exactly clear, but yeah, the suggestion is that like there were some of the regularities in the procurement process where they got rid of some of their other shrimp suppliers and ended up sending more and more money directly to Taie Union for more and more shrimp, and.
Thai Union of course disputes that passionately. They say that all of those issues concerning the company and its relationship to Red Lobster, you know, are basically false. But it is interesting that this started out as a limited promotion and then I think it was May twenty twenty three, actually it turned into a permanent promotion, this endless shrimp fiasco.
It just makes sense. Yeah, But if you own a company that is going under, and by like February this year, Thai Union is saying the value of their equity at zero. You own a company that's going under, yeah, you get as much money as you can out of it, and you also sell that company shrimp. The goal is to sell them as many shrimp as possible.
They did end up losing eleven million dollars on it, which is not huge in.
The ground that gets you billion dollars.
There's a lot of money to lose on shrimp, though, I mean, I certainly haven't come anywhere close to that.
It is a lot of money to lose on shrimp. Red Lives the bankruptcy file has a lot of like good stats, including they're like twenty percent of the total market for lobster tales like in the world. So yeah, I mean, like, if anyone is going to lose eleven million dollars on shrimp, it's definitely red lobster. But that's probably not enough to drive them into bankruptcy, but it is enough to be very very funny in bankruptcy.
It made for some amazing headlines, some amazing thought pieces, some amazing money stuff columns. Let's talk about the leases though, because a lot of people are pointing to the leases at.
Sure sure, Like the boring answer is that, like there's a sort of classic private equity stripping story where it's like, you know, they were owned it on point by General Mills.
They're on a Darden restaurant company. They were sold in a leveraged buyout where basically the buyer to finance the deal, sold a lot of their locations and leased them back, and so they entered into a lot of like expensive leases, and when hard times came, they didn't own their own real estate, and so they had a little bit less financial flexibility because that all these lease payments, and so
that was also hard on them. I'm always like skeptical of these explanations because it's like that would work that fine had business kept improving, right, and it worked out poorly because business was declining. Like it adds leverage, right, it lowers your margin for error. But like it seems like the explanation here is not like Red Lobster was
doing great and then like financial shenanigans destroyed it. The story is like Red Lobster is not doing that great and the financial maneuvers gave it less of a margin for error. But like, ultimately, this is a change in consumer tastes story, and it turns out the consumer taster
or not for that many shrimp. Although the funny thing is like, in conjunction with like these stories about Red Lobster's collapse, you also read a lot of anecdotes about people eating one hundred and eighty shrimp at a sitting or whatever. I mean, why wouldn't you for reasons, but like you know that someone.
Will I mean shrimp. I don't like shrimp, but shrimp are kind of the perfect food if you're just trying to get a lot of protein.
It is true that if I were any one hundred and eighty of a food. It might be a shrimp. Yeah, come on, well, the Red Lobster advertised all the shrimps you could eat. That attracted some number of people who are like, oh, I can eat a lot of shrimp, Red Lobster, And it.
Probably did get people in the door. But there was a.
Really get negative margins.
Yeah, exactly. And there was a fun Bloomberg News piece just talking about the state of the restaurant business right now. I don't think it's any surprise that inflation is still pretty high, pretty sticky. The absolute level of prices is much higher than it was. And you have all of these restaurant changs who you know, their businesses are in much better shape than Red Lobster, but they're just going
for these promotions. You think about Applebee has one dollar Margaritos right now, which I actually would like to try. I can't imagine that as much alcohol. And then Chili's has recently introduced the Big Smasher. It's part of its broader campaign to have three menu items. You put them all together, they cost eleven dollars. Stay with me here anyway, And then.
Maybe you say you put them all together like on a plate or like when you say, like, do they actually get a blender?
You know, definitely not that one. Like you order three menu items and all together it costs like eleven dollars. But then they quote this man, he's the CEO of Aaron Allen and Associates. It's a restaurant consulting firm, and he says that these chains sabotage themselves by trading down just to get cheap hits. It's like taking grandma's jewelry to the pawn shop just to get a few quick bucks. And I guess that's kind of what Red Lobster did.
Are the jewels the lobsters in this scenario, I'm torturing? Yeah, And so I don't know if I feel like it was a whole host of factors. It's probably crushing the entire restaurant industry right now is sort of the fast casual space. Those financial maneuvers that you described.
Yeah, I just I love the idea that there is a shrimp conspiracy. Yeah, because, like right, there are a lot of factors that are affecting all of the competitors, but like here there's the specific factor that they are owned by their supplier, and so it's like we can just pump shrimp through the red lobster.
System and no one will ever know.
No one will ever know except that the CEO.
Know who put in place the CEO? Was it Thai Union.
Well so the old CEO Tai Union, yeah, pointed and the allegations now that he was in the pocket of Ti Union. But no, the new CEO is from ALPHAREZM. Marshall is like basically part of the restructuring team. So he like kind of works for the creditors. And you know, I wrote in m my column in the first day of the bankruptcy filing, he writes this statement sort of alleging that Tai Union was doing all this stuff, the
stuff shrimp through the system. And I wrote that, you know, in his position, quote you cast a wide net for possible ways to claw back money for creditors, which I didn't really intend as a lobster pun. But like several readers put.
That claw terrible. That's just terrible.
I mean, like he works for the creditors and like they need to find as much money as they can, and like to the extent millions of dollars went out the door to pay Tie Union for shrip. You have some case to say it shouldn't have done that, and like that was a violation of their duty to the company and get the money back.
I mean the fact that Tai Union appointed the CEO and then whittled it down. It's the owner of the company, I know, but still and then whittled it down to be the sole supplier. If they were one of several, maybe that would be a better look.
It's definitely something that looks like a conflict of interest.
It certainly does. What I'm unclear on is whether the promotion it's not still going on. Could you and I go to the Red Lobster in Times Square.
I was thinking about trying to record this podcast from a Red Lobster, but I thought they shut down a lot of the restaurants.
But the one in Times Square is still open. I know that because Bloomberg has actually sent some reporters there and.
They get the shrimp.
They interviewed a lot of guests, they get the shrimp that was not in the article Red Luster.
At this late date at Red Lobster and not ordering the end of this ship.
I know, I know it wasn't in the article. I feel like we need a little bit more on the ground reporting. But if the shrimp promotion is still going on ourselves, I don't eat shrimp, but I would choke down. Maybe maybe not one hundred and eighty, but.
No, I will say, yeah, this is less funny than the shrimp. But people email me about this. There is this analogy to the AI investing boom, oh.
My god, No, Okay, go ahead.
There's this article from a poor Agarwalla a couple of months ago about large language model AI startups and a lot of their investors are like big cloud and chip
companies like Nvidia and Google and Amazon and Microsoft. And he wrote this article being like, there is a weird tension there because these companies are investing billions of dollars in these AI startups, but a lot of that money is going right back to the cloud providers in the form of like paying for chips or paying for cloud compute, and so like when in Video or Microsoft invests in an AI startup, like it can say I'm putting in a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation, but
it's getting most of that money back right, It's like going to the supplier's bottom line. So he argues that's bad for venture capitalists in that space, because like the valuation of these companies is being driven up by people whose interest in the company is not just being an
equity investor, but is also being a supplier. And He's like there's conflicts of interests where like if you are Microsoft or in Video and you're a big shareholder in these AI startups, you know, you're like on the board,
you have control over this company. You might make decisions that are in your best interest as a supplier and not necessarily in the best interest of the company or in the other investors, because your money is not really an equity investment, it's really about finding customers for your cloud compute power.
Similarly with the shrimp, Yeah, I was going to say I was skeptical, and then actually that is a really neat parallel in.
Most of these cases, like these companies are not the controlling shawl, they're appointing the sea. Yeah. Right, Usually there's like some independent you know, like the startup has its own business model. But right, I mean, like there are conflicts of interest there where if you're like a big supplier, a big exclusive supplier, a lot of the equity investment is going directly to you, Like your interest is maybe less as an equity investor more as a supplier.
I will say, like imagining, you know, an executive with semiconductor chips falling out of his pockets and his briefcase. It's definitely not as much fun as shrimp. But that does make a lot of sense.
Right, Like you hope that like this is like in the earlier stage where it's like not as fun. You're not like, oh, they're like stuffing computing power into these AI startups, right because like they're all trying to make money. They're all, you know, optimistic and hopeful. It's not like Red Lovester with like sort of the end of the run. But uh, I don't know, food.
For thoughts, some shrimp for thought. From shrimp to fat fingers. This is a sad story because that's a great story. I mean, it is about human error and who among us hasn't accidentally tried to sell four hundred and forty four billion dollars worth of equities.
It is the most natural mistake it can possibly make.
Why don't you walk us through the worst fourteen minutes of this trader's career.
Okay, So there's a trader at city in London, apparently working.
From home on a Monday holiday.
On a Monday Bank holiday.
Talk about a bad Monday.
So this trader works on the Delta one desk and city to hedge an index features order has to sell a big basket of stocks on thirteen different European stock exchanges. Pulls up the order management system. There's like a box where you enter the quantity you want to sell. Actually there's two boxes. You can enter the quantity in terms of like units basically like shares of the index, or
you can enter the quantity in dollars. This person wants to sell fifty eight million dollars, enters fifty eight million in the shares field, and therefore sells fifty eight million units, which is you know, four hundred and forty four billion dollars worth of stocks. So fills out the form and then this is the amazing part to me, the order management system displays you know, fifty eight million units, but
then also displays a dollar amount. But instead of displaying four hundred and forty four billion, which is the actual dollar amount, it displays negative fifty eight million. Because in that field, it like pulls in from an external pricing source and the pricing source is like turned off that morning because I don't know if because the market's not opener, because the bank holiday or whatever. The pricing source is
turned off. And so City's system says, the pricing sources isn't available, so we're going to default to negative one dollar as a price for each share, right, So the trader types in fifty eight million shares, and the thing pulls in a price of negative fifty eight million. So the trader looks at that and says, yes, right, I wanted fifty eight million dollars. It's showing me fifty eight
million dollars. Now there's a minussignment. You know, everything is like no one knows what the sign is supposed to be on any of these systems, And so the trader's like, yes, okay, fifty eight million dollars just like I thought. Clicks okay. Then the next thing the system does pops up seven hundred and eleven warning error messages right saying, are you sure you want to sell you know, a billion dollars worth of stock in Sweden? Are you sure you want
to sell a billion dollars worth of that? Suck? And the trader, first of all, only sees eighteen of these messages because you have to scroll down to see the other six hundred nine and why would you and telling yeah, it's a big order whatever, I'm clicking yes, so trader clicks yes. Then it shows like a final confirmation, like do you really want to sell? And at this point it has crossed off half of the orders. It's like
half of these orders. Even cities somewhat chanky system knows that it should not sell, you know, more than two billion dollars worth of any stock, so like all the stocks that s to some more than two billion dollars worth, it cuts out, but still it says, okay, fine, do you really want to sell one hundred and ninety six
billion dollars worth of stock? And at this point the trader says sure and clicks yes, and off City goes to sell one hundred ninety six billion dollars worth of stock, which causes a flash crash, and like a bunch of different European stock markets.
Yeah, I mean, it's just amazing. Hearing you describe it makes my blood run cold. I do like to think that somewhere along that line I would have stopped myself, but one never knows.
I got a lot of emails from people being like this person should have stopped themselves. I tell you I know at this point from my own computer use. I know enough about myself to know I would not.
Have lived there messages.
You know, because you're an experienced trader, right, you've done this before? You fill the form. You see the form show you fifty eight million dollars. You're like, yes, click yes, and then you get like seven more click buttons that to you are just a waste. They're like, okay, I've already checked it. It's already yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes yes, and you just click. You don't look, I think,
is what happened here. I'm not responsible for trading tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of stocks across Europe, but like I click yes all the.
Time, man, I mean, I think about like my own stupid mistakes. I don't have anything of this magnitude, but like sending an instant Bloomberg message to the wrong person, making typos, et cetera, it happens. What is amazing. You described it as city somewhat janky system. It wouldn't have happened in New York necessarily, but it did happen in London.
They had hard limits on how much you could sell at one time in New York.
Yeah, And the natural question is why, But I don't know if you have that answer.
I don't know the answer. But you know, everything is like silent and hierarchical, and some people put it in place and some people don't. You know, I don't have a good answer to why. But one loss put it in one didn't.
This in and of itself is amazing, but it's even more amazing when you think about City's history, which you write about, and you think about what happened with Revlon, for example, because it hits a lot of the same notes.
Yeah, I mean the Revlon thing. City was like the administrativevision on this big loan to Revlon, and like there was a sort of fight over whether Reverend was in default. And as part of that fight, Revlin meant to pay like seven million dollars an interest to a couple of hedge funds, and instead City paid nine hundred million dollars paid back the loan in full. And then City was like, oops,
can we have the money back? Like half of the lenders were like sure, here's the money back, and half of them were like in this fight with Revlin and we're like, no, we're keeping the money and going to court.
They kind of went in court and eventually lost, but in the court decision in loving detailed describes how city messed this up, and it's just incredible, like they had this system where like the only way for them to make this interest payment was for some reason, to pay off the entire principle of the loan, and the City's like, well, I was going want to do that. So no, it's okay, you can pay off the entire principle to like a
fake memo account. So the system thinks it's paying off the entire principle, but it's not really, no money is going out the door. And so he's like, sure, that sounds great, let's do that, right, which is first of all, like a terrifying thing to agree to. But then secondly, in order to have it only be paid to a fake account and not actually go out the door, you have to click like three boxes, and one is like
pay the principle to the fake account. You're like, okay, click the principal box, and then the other two are like just bizarre buzzwords, and so like the three people, three people had to do this, the three people signing off on the city thing, like yep, the right boxes checked, but then they didn't check the other two boxes that were more complicated, and so they sent out nine hundred
million dollars by accident. And then when they saw that it had gone out, they called tech support and we like, the system isn't working. And ultimately turned out the system was working, but like you know, the system was terribly.
Dissigned, right, and that happened in twenty twenty one. Yeah, this trade happened in twenty twenty two, so maybe maybe maybe it's all fix, it's all fun. I thought it was an interesting size and scope. So ultimately they were fined seventy eight million dollars. And apparently when regulators were thinking about how big the fine should actually be, they were thinking about how much it cost them in part.
So basically, the Banks Delta one division had generated roughly six hundred and twelve million dollars in the nine years leading up to this trade, in average about sixty eight million dollars a year, So you layer on the fines and the trading losses from that day, and that trade costs those desks nearly two years of revenue, which is pretty painful. That's two years, two years and fourteen minutes.
That's so sad.
It is so sad.
It's so sad everything you work for and you put like one number in the wrong box and it's like it's all all goes up in flames.
I always think about that when you read stories like this about someone who just makes a human accident, some unintended pilot hour, no malicious intentions and just a all over. And I always think about like the months in the weeks leading up them going about their lives, not knowing that this cataclysmic event was going to happen. And here we are, and Bloomberg News has reported that this trader doesn't work at City anymore. I'm not that.
Surprised, but I will say this fine and even this loss are not about the trader putting the number in the wrong box. Like this is a system design issue, right, Like yeah, the problem here is like, yes, putting the number in the wrong box, but like having a system that, like the computer also got confused between the number of shares on the dollar in a matter right the computer was like, oh, yeah, they're all worth one dollar a share, right, like wrongly, but then also like the after trade checks
were just not effective. Right in New York, they would have blocked this trade automatically, even in London, Like if you're popping up seven hundred and eleven error messages, it's like maybe make a bigger run.
But all that being said, do you think that any of the other banks who could potentially hire this trader are thinking that way? Or are they?
I would hire this trader really, Yeah, that's not like on the list of like.
Well, they're probably never going to do it again.
Right, One, they're never going to do it again, and two like, look, obviously people care a lot about attention to detail, but like there are other skills and like probably everyone would mess this up once. It's just that if they have better software to catch it, they won't actually cost the bank one hundred million dollars.
Yeah, make better software.
I think that's the answer that this port trader. Now I feel really bad.
Yeah, this was kind of a bummer.
I do think. The other thing that's amazing in this case is that the risk managers who are there directly responsible for oversight of this, like their job was to catch this. They went on vacation eight minutes before the trade happened.
That is wild. I mean just the timeline of this whole thing, but the eight minutes that seems like almost unbelievable.
I'm exaggerating when I say they went on vacation. Like what happened is that, like the handoff from like the right team to the wrong team happened eight minutes before this trade, which I think must mean that the right team in like Asia was handing it off to the wrong team in London because the damon London was out for the bank holiday.
Yeah, but in any case, right, they probably sent that email, slammed the Laptop show, and then they literally were on vacation.
So yeah, I wonder if they got controlled.
This is the section of this podcast that I have the lowest expectations for.
Your nucleus accumbents is not lighting up with this one.
I was hoping they section of your.
Brain that anticipates rewards.
I did google that and the definition was something along those lines, and then it said it was an incomplete definition. To just think of it as like the reward center of your brain. But I don't know what.
No, I have a much more nuanced understanding of the nucleus accumbents, I will not share with you.
Very good, very well. So we're in this situation again where we're recording this podcast before your or newsletter on this topic has come out. I read the actual paper and I got to say a lot of it was beyond me. But why don't you tell us about this paper?
This is an incredible favor by basically business school professors as opposed to medical school professors. But it's called brain activity of professional investors signals future stock performance. So what they did is they took a bunch of like Dutch professional investors, like people who work at mutual funds, and they popped them in an MRI machine and they showed them slides of investment presentations about forty five stocks, and
they're all like historical. So they would show these like sort of masked investment cases for a bunch of stocks at like different times of the past ten years, and they were like, what do you think would you buy the stock right? Do you think the stock will up
perform its sector? The investors in the MRI machine either said yes or no. And they also ran the MRIO while they're doing this, and it turns out that the investor's answers were worthless, Like they did not accurately predict no better than chance's ability to predict whether the stocks
would go up or down. But their brains, their brains did accurately predict whether the stocks would cover down, which is to say that if you looked at like ridging, their brain called the nucleus siccumbents, which is like sort of the thing that anticipates rewards, right, it lit up when they saw presentations about stocks that were going to go up, so subconsciously they knew which stocks would go up, even though consciously they did not know what stocks would go up.
I do love that. It's amazing, but the how do you apply it?
How do you possibly you put your portfolio manager in an MRI all day?
That's it? Yes, I mean I think that that would be a terrible a terrible existence.
But like if you made a lot of money.
Yeah, true, I mean.
If this really worked, by the way, I'm not you know, I'm not so sure how well this really worked, but it worked in some experimental design. But it's fascinating too because like how could this work? Right? Like, how could it be that you can subconsciously.
Just know which stocks secatifitely know, but you can't translate that into an actionable decision.
Yeah. But so here's what I think the explanation is. To the extent this is real in the introduction to paper, they're like the other experiments like this, and one is like a sort of famous. One is like you play songs to people in an MRI, and the songs that light up their brains in certain ways go on to become hit songs. It sounds like people's brains instinctively know
it's going to be hit songs. Well that makes a lot of sense, right, right, Like something about that song instinctively like makes everyone like it, right, Like it lights up a section of your brain, Like, of course that's going to go on to be a hit. Right. Maybe it's the same with stocks, right, It's like a meme stock phenomenon, where like something about a stock makes these investors like it, that's going to make other investors like it, and so the stock will go up. Right. So that's
how it works. It has nothing to do with fundamental
financial analysis. It just has to do with something in the shape of the stock makes people like it, and stocks that people like go up because they buy them right, And if you look at the paper, like the way they present these investment cases to like the portfolio managers in the MRI is like they show them the company description, and they show them a price chart, and they show them like a fundamentals page that's like a bunch of like ratios and earnings information, and they show them news
they show them like summaries of It's like some news items about the stocks. What actually lights up their brains is just the description and the price chart. So like the fundamental page worthless for the price chart. They see the price chart and their brain lights up, like that's a good sign.
People like lines, yeah, but.
Only some lines, right. The lines that make their brains light up are the lines that will go up in the future, right, Like the good looking lines are the good stocks to buy. It's like technical analysis. If you look at a chart and the chart makes you happy, then it'll probably make other people happy, and so you should buy that stock.
That is the best reason why technical analysis might be real that I've heard. The only reason it's just good lines.
Technical analysis is like organized mass psychology. Right, It's like, oh, this line shows that people like the stock, right, It's not that weird to think that you could grasp that at a pre conscious level, right where you would see the lines and you don't know what the lines mean, but like somewhere deep in your animal brain you're like, oh that's a good stock.
You're here. Lizard brain activates, and that's basically the foundation of technical analysis. I mean, again, who knows if any of this is actually real? I feel like the only way to really find out is if this was applied at scale and we gave this.
Yeah, all you know academic finance paper is it's like okay, sure that's an interesting result, but like what hedge funds are implementing it?
Right? Yeah?
And like I don't know, like you could see Steve copy like hmm right, Like that's like a thing.
That someone should send him this paper.
It's in money Stock.
Well I hope he read it.
I mean you probably have to pay a premium. But like if there's some marginal investor who like can't quite get a job as a portfolio manager at a top multi strategy fund, but if you were in an MRI machine, he could oh yeah, yeah.
I mean it's all in there. It was bright exactly. He just he can't translate it. I will say it's been a while since I read a paper like this, and I always love methodology. And there were a few charming details in here about the actual participants, Like you said, they're from leading Dutch investment companies, thirty four participants. Only one was a one. I noticed that immediately the mean age was forty seven.
You want to do that experiment better, right, But like I would be interested in doing this experiment because these are all like Dutch professional money maners. Yeah, I'm interested in doing it on day traders right. Oh yeah, because the thing that is happening here is not like deep fundamental analysis, right. Something that's happening here is like, oh that line looks good. Maybe like a random amateur would be just as good.
Yeah, that's true. We should try it on all different members of the population. I also thought this was cute. So participants received no compensation, but whoever was the most accurate in predicting stock outcomes would be awarded a prize of five hundred euros. There were two winners, so that they had to split the prize. They each got two hundred and fifty euros for all told, this lasted eighty five minutes, so that's a pretty good return on your time.
I mean I don't know. I mean probably you're like a one in like thirty chance that two hundred and fifty euros for an hour and a half at an MRI, Like.
I don't know, I would do it. Tell it's a.
Professional money manager's like their day job is picking slacks that will go up and they get paid more than that.
For Yeah, but it sounds like they're not too good at that.
And that was The Money Stuff Podcast.
I'm Matt Levian and I'm Katie Greifeld.
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