Leverage and Margin Explained: The Power and Peril of Borrowed Money

GameStop and the Stock Market

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy uses the 2021 GameStop saga to reveal the hidden machinery that runs underneath every stock trade.  He explains how a struggling video-game retailer became the most heavily bet-against stock on Wall Street, why ordinary investors banded together to buy it, and how its price rocketed from about $17 to around $483 in a matter of weeks.  Then he answers the question that left millions of people furious: why did Robinhood suddenly stop letting them buy? The culprit turns out to be the market's plumbing — the two-day settlement delay, the clearinghouse that guarantees every trade, and the collateral deposit that exploded into the billions when prices swung wildly.  AndrewTemte.com

Insider Trading, Reg FD, and Why Markets Have Rules

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explores information asymmetry—the gap between what some market participants know and what others know—and the rules that try to keep that gap from getting too wide.  He walks through the structural advantages built into the architecture of the market itself, the meaningful distinction between buy-side and sell-side analysts that financial pundits throw around without explanation, and the legal line that separates productive research from criminal insider trading.  Andy then unpacks Regulation Fair Disclosure—the SEC rule adopted in 2000 that ended the worst of selective disclosure to favored Wall Street clients. The closing message: the retail investor is structurally on the wrong side of many information gaps, and the most reliable response is to focus on what you can actually control. AndrewTemte.com

Short Selling: Borrowing Shares Instead of Money

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy explores one of the most misunderstood practices in financial markets — short selling. He traces the origins of the practice to Isaac Le Maire and the Dutch East India Company in 1609, walks through the mechanics of borrowing shares to sell them, and explains the asymmetric risk that makes short positions fundamentally different from owning a stock.  He brings the lesson to life with the spectacular 2008 Volkswagen short squeeze, when the German automaker briefly became the most valuable listed company in the world. AndrewTemte.com

The Quarterly Rhythm That Shapes American Business

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy picks up where last week's IPO episode left off and walks through what changes once a company is publicly traded.  He explains the lockup period that follows every IPO — using Airbnb's May 17, 2021 lockup expiration and six-percent drop as the concrete example — then breaks down the SEC's three core disclosure filings (10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K) that drive the rhythm of public-company life.  Andy then tackles the real cost of all this — short-termism — citing Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon's 2018 Wall Street Journal op-ed and drawing on his own experience to show how the quarterly cycle shapes corporate behavior at public and private companies alike.  AndrewTemte.com

Going Public: How a Private Company Becomes a Stock You Can Buy

In this episode of Money Lessons, Andy walks through what happens when a company goes public — how a private business with a small group of owners becomes a publicly traded stock that anyone with a brokerage account can buy.  The episode covers the five reasons companies decide to go public, the underwriting process and the role of investment banks, the road show and how the offering price gets set, and what happens on the first day of trading — including why the price you and I pay is almost always different from the price the institutions paid the night before.  Using Airbnb's December 2020 IPO as a concrete example, Andy unpacks the "pop" between offering price and opening price, then revisits the three risks of stock ownership from two weeks ago to highlight how cognitive biases — particularly the urge to follow the crowd — make hot IPOs especially dangerous territory for everyday investors. AndrewTemte.com