Ovarian Cancer, Padel & Shorting Stocks

Ovarian cancer is a misnomer. Nearly all ovarian cancers, and nearly all fatal ovarian cancers, are actually cancers of the fallopian tubes. The 20 percent or so that start in the ovaries are different, and usually can be cured.

Women who have their tubes (the gummy worm-shaped ducts that carry eggs from the ovaries to the uterus) removed reduce their chances of getting ovarian cancer by nearly 80 percent. It’s a five-minute operation that can be done as part of nearly any abdominal surgery, including a hysterectomy, tubal ligation, gallbladder surgery and hernia repair.

Most doctors (and the public) do not know about this new approach, even though professional groups like the American Cancer Society, the American College of Surgeons and the European Society of Gynaecological Oncology have recently issued statements encouraging doctors to offer tube removal at the time of other abdominal surgeries.

The American Cancer Society is now working on a national campaign to make more women and doctors aware that tube removal can help prevent most ovarian cancers.

Women have, on average, a 1.1 percent risk of being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, among the most deadly of all cancers. Screening to find it early does not work (death rates do not budge). Ultrasound, blood tests and advanced imaging have all failed. And most of the 20,000 women a year who receive a diagnosis of ovarian cancer have no known risk factors. By the time they find out why they have vague symptoms like bloating and abdominal pain, the cancer has spread throughout their bodies. Surgery and chemotherapy, the standard treatments, are unlikely to cure them.

The tumors start as microscopic specks of cancer cells that spill out of the wide end of the fallopian tube that is nestled against an ovary. They seed the ovary and abdomen, where they grow and become lethal. You can liken these tiny cancer cells to dust coming up from a rug and floating through a room. They’re like dandruff drifting down to a person’s shoulders.

It explains why early diagnosis so often fails: Those tiny cells do not show up on ultrasound or other imaging.

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Padel is the new pickleball.

There are now 1,000+ publicly accessible padel courts in the U.S., up from about 227 three years ago. Last year, padel drew one million players domestically and, padel club and individual memberships grew by about 50 percent year-over-year.

Padel is mostly played as doubles, and courts are smaller than tennis courts, making it more social and easier to get to know other players.

Across the country, entrepreneurs are capitalizing on the interest by retrofitting unconventional spaces, from parking lots to distribution warehouses, with padel courts. On the sidelines of some are saunas and bars where players can mingle between matches.

Last year, over 24 million Americans played pickleball, up from about 4 million in 2020. Investors believe padel has the potential to grow like pickleball, but the cost to install one padel court can be around $50,000 because of the glass and other materials for the walls. Pickleball courts are much cheaper to build.

Instead of strings, padel rackets have holes in their dense heads. Padel balls share a color with tennis balls, but are less bouncy. The sport’s rectangular courts are 66-feet long by 33-feet wide, divided by a net and surrounded by four walls made of glass panels and mesh.

Playing singles tennis is still the best exercise, but padel doubles provides more exercise than tennis doubles.

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Of the 233 countries and territories in the dataset, men outnumber women in just 33%. Despite the smaller number of male-majority countries, there are roughly 42 million more men than women worldwide.

There are two main reasons for this.

The Gulf states are the clearest outliers. Countries such as Qatar, the UAE, Oman, and Kuwait rely heavily on temporary migrant workers employed in construction, energy, and infrastructure, industries dominated by men. Because many of these workers arrive without their families, national gender balances become unusually skewed.
Three of the world’s most populous countries, China, India, and the United States, all have more men than women. Although their ratios are less extreme, their large populations magnify the difference. In India alone, a ratio of 106.3 men per 100 women translates into a male surplus of more than 40 million.

Countries with more women:

Russia offers one of the region’s most prominent examples. Higher male mortality, shorter male life expectancy, historical wartime losses, and alcohol-related deaths all contribute to its ratio of 86.4 men per 100 women.

Sex ratios at birth naturally favor boys by a small margin, but populations rarely maintain that balance. Migration, life expectancy, war, public health, and economic opportunity can all reshape a country’s demographic profile over decades.

As these forces evolve, the map represents a snapshot rather than a permanent reality. Countries experiencing rapid immigration, population aging, conflict, or major improvements in healthcare may see their gender balance shift substantially from one generation to the next.

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Hedge funds that are short-biased or short-only surged after the 2008 downturn, and they are slowly disappearing as the U.S. bull market in stocks extends toward its 18th year.

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Shareholder Yield = the total cash a company returns to its investors (stockholders).

This occurs through three main factors: (1) dividends (2) net stock buybacks; repurchases minus newly issues shares (3) net debt reduction.

Price’s Law, Colon Cancer & Nike’s Strategy

In 1963, a physicist named Derek Price was studying scientific publications, trying to understand why some researchers dominated their fields while others published and got zero attention. He found that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

In a company with 100 employees, 10 people produce half the output
In a field with 10,000 scientists, 100 produce half the meaningful research
On a team of 25, 5 people carry the entire operation

It wasn’t exclusive to research papers—this pattern showed up everywhere he looked.

Of the 30 million businesses in the United States, about 5,500 (the square root) generate half the total economic output.
Spotify has about 11 million artists, but 50% of all streams are generated by only 3,300 artists.
In astrophysics, the square root of stars in a galaxy produce half the light.
In creative fields like YouTube, very few channels account for the vast majority of both views and ad revenue.

Price’s Law violates our egalitarian instincts. We want to believe everyone contributes equally, that effort equals outcome, that hard work is the great equalizer, but reality is far from it.

You need (1) skill, (2) consistency, (3) opportunity, and (4) luck all compounding in the same direction. Most people have one or two of those ingredients. The square root has all four.

Price’s Law reveals that equality of outcome and equality of opportunity cannot coexist in complex systems. Even if you give everyone the same resources, the same training, the same chance, outcomes will still stratify eventually. Some people will compound their advantages. Most won’t.

What does this mean in practice?

You have dozens of skills, but √n of them drive half your value in the marketplace. The reason why we spend so much time trying to be “well-rounded” is because we’ve been lied to.
If you work 40 hours a week, about 6 of those hours actually matter. The other 34 are maintenance, “busywork,” meetings that could’ve been emails, and a whole lot of goofing around.

The paradox (why we still need to do the other 90%): you can’t know which skills are your multipliers without trying a bunch of skills. You can’t know which relationships matter without meeting a lot of people.

The early game is exploration. You’re planting seeds everywhere, seeing what grows. Price’s Law hasn’t kicked in yet because you don’t have enough data.
The middle game is identification. Patterns are emerging. “Oh, this is what works.” That’s your √n.
The late game is exploitation. You double down on the winners. You cut out the losers. You focus your energy towards the best bets.

Explore the noise until you have signal. Then exploit that.

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As of April 2026, Nike stock sat below US$45 – a market capitalisation of US$68 billion, its lowest level in over a decade, and a fall of more than 75% from the US$280 billion the company commanded at its 2021 peak.

How does what was once considered one of the widest consumer brand moats in the world, built over half a century, erode over the course of a few short years?

A good starting point is January 2020, when John Donahoe took over as Nike’s new CEO. The board wanted a digital-first operator, and Donahoe had the résumé – ServiceNow, eBay, and Bain – even if he was one of the few leaders in Nike’s history not to have risen through its operating ranks.

Several major strategic shifts followed, each departing from what had worked for Nike for decades – yet each looked like a logical transformational move to take Nike into the 2020s. The financial pay-offs were immediate: gross margins expanded, SGA came down, and return on ad spend looked sharper quarter by quarter. Wall Street loved it.

Yet each of these moves shared a common mechanism: they improved short-term financial metrics by drawing down assets that had taken decades to build. In effect, Nike was not just transforming its business – it was monetising its moat. We will examine each in turn.

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The number of patients in their 30s and 40s with late-stage cancer in their lower digestive tract is surgin. It’s not just that these patients are decades younger than what had been typical for colorectal cancer; the tumors themselves are also more stubborn to treat.

Even though young patients are treated with more aggressive chemo or more surgery, patients’ outcomes are not necessarily better. The disease has become the top cancer killer among people under 50, even as death rates decline in older age groups.

Doctors suspect that the gut’s microbiome is a key actor behind these forms of cancer in particular. Patient advocates say it’s critical that more people, especially young adults with a family history of these cancers, get diagnostic testing.Genetics plays some role in colorectal cancers; as many as a fifth of patients have hereditary markers. But genetics do not explain what drives the vast majority (80%) of cases.

Thirty-plus years ago almost zero patients were in clinics under the age of 50 with colon cancer. Now it is almost half. There are other changes in disease pattern with earlier onset tumors that tend to show up differently; more tumors are found near the rectum, lower in the tract.

Experts suspect several factors may be leading to these more frequent, virulent cancers:

Ultra-processed foods
Plastics and chemicals that can leach into water and our bodies
As a population, we are not as active as we used to be.

All of these factors act on our gut, the composition of our microbiomes, and the bacteria and myriad microorganisms living there.

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This, of course, has consequences. Here are six:

Monetary policy transmission is direct. When the Fed lowers (raises) rates, US households buy (sell) stocks. No other central bank has this much control over consumer sentiment and spending via markets. The wealth effect makes policy both more powerful and harder to control.
Markets and politics. When 60% of households own stocks, markets drive elections. Politicians and central bankers in the US hate crashes almost as much as they hate high gas prices. This holds down volatility and encourages wacky risk-taking.
Passive indexing makes it worse. Most of that 60% own stocks through 401(k)s and IRAs invested in index funds. This means a huge share of American household wealth is concentrated in the same ~500 companies, weighted by market cap. Diversification is an illusion at the aggregate level. Everyone is long NVIDIA, whether they know it (or want it) or not.
Retirement security is market performance. The US shifted from defined benefit to defined contribution pensions over the last 40 years. A sustained bear market is no longer just a financial event — it’s a retirement crisis.
Inequality is amplified. The 60% figure is misleading because the bottom half of that cohort owns virtually no stock. The top 10% hold ~90% of equity wealth.
Contagion from US markets is a virus. Because US households are so deeply exposed, a domestic equity crisis hits consumer spending, which then spreads worldwide through trade. The US market is the world’s risk-off/risk-on switch, and the household exposure ratio is part of why.

College, Cancer & Wages

The share of elite MBA grads still looking for work 3+ months after graduation is up sharply at practically every high-ranking school. The traditional elite-MBA absorption process—1) Get degree; 2) Glide path to Big Tech/Consulting—seems disrupted.

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Gen Z is the most money-centric generation we’ve seen yet.

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The face of cancer in the U.S. is getting younger—and more feminine. Cancer rates for women in the U.S. have risen over the past half-century, particularly among women under age 65 diagnosed with breast cancer. For decades, the cancer burden in the U.S. was higher for men, who started smoking en masse in the 20th century. Their rates of lung-cancer cases and deaths soared. Lung cancer remains the biggest cancer killer for men in the U.S., but case and death rates have dropped, after smoking rates declined.

Women started smoking heavily later than men and have been slower to quit, so their lung-cancer decline started later and hasn’t been as steep. That has had a significant impact: Lung cancer incidence among women under 65 was greater than among men for the first time in 2021. Women are also more likely to get diagnosed with lung cancer as nonsmokers.

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We rank nine major U.S. airlines on seven equally weighted operations metrics: on-time arrivals, flight cancellations, delays of 45 minutes or more, baggage handling, tarmac delays, involuntary bumping and what the Transportation Department calls passenger submissions (which are mostly complaints).

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Parlays, the tough-to-win multipart wagers with tantalizing payouts, are bringing in casual and newbie gamblers, and betting companies are making a killing. FanDuel said 90% of its same-game parlays, or bets on multiple developments within one event, have a wager of $30 or less, while 60% are $5 or less. About 20% of all money spent by DraftKings on national TV advertising last year hyped parlays, compared with 11% in 2022.

Parlays accounted for about 27% of the money wagered on all sports bets last year through October in Illinois, New Jersey and Colorado, states in which gambling regulators report data by bet type. That’s up from 22% of all sports bets in 2021. The multi-leg bets delivered about 56% of sports-betting revenue after payouts for companies in the three states during that period, up from 50% in the same stretch of 2021.

Multi-leg bets are so lucrative that FanDuel parent company Flutter Entertainment recently increased its expectation for total online gambling revenues in the U.S. to $63 billion by 2030, up from its estimate of $40 billion two years ago, driven in part by parlays, the company said.

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People are usually surprised when they see how Japan has grown its dividends at a 6.9% annual clip over the last 20 years, outpacing the 6.7% growth pace of the S&P 500. Japan trades for 13.5x forward earnings, or a 37% discount to the S&P’s P/E of 21.3.

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A massive wage arbitrage has opened between the US and its competitors. The overwhelming majority of people in the US have no idea just how much more money they make than the Japanese, French, British, etc.