Teachers Hate Homework Too — In fact, teachers hate homework so much that they are flooding out of schools in droves to go work for themselves, Jeff Bezos, or Ronald McDonald. And it’s not helping the learning crisis faced by America’s youth… at all. 

We know 2021 was the year of the quitter, but no cohort of people did a better job of quitting than U.S. teachers. Data from LinkedIn shows a 62% jump in the number of teachers who switched jobs last year, and if we go back even further, we can see that quits in educational services jumped 148% between January and November of 2021. 

And teachers are in demand, both in and out of the classroom. Districts across the nation struggled through an Omicron flareup that shut down schools for not having enough teachers on certain days. 

Meanwhile, the stress management, multitasking, communication, and listening skills wielded by teachers make them top prospects in places like IT departments, consulting, software development, and, of course, Amazon warehouses.

And who can blame them? Compared to teaching, the benefits of working at a large, private employer are like that of Queen Victoria to the average 19th-century British steel mill worker. Amazon, for example, pays a minimum wage of $15/hr (starting higher in many locations) and does things like give free community college to employees. Sure, teachers get three months off in the summer, but the other nine months are spent dealing with all of our pieces of sh*t kids.

Jokes aside, this is not good. Children have already been hit with the developmental hammer by being locked inside alone for months on end, drastically impacting both social and cognitive development. Losing teachers doesn’t exactly help with that.

Hedge No-More-Fun-ds — Great vehicles for intelligent speculative investing and self-glorification, hedge funds have long followed a similar playbook. But, as pointed out by Matt Levine at Bloomberg, this common strategy appears to be falling out of favor.

Here’s how hedge funds have traditionally worked: Some banker/trader at a big shop decides at the age of 25-35 that she is better than her company. To prove that, she takes that investment strategy that has worked for her over the years. Whether it be volatility trading, long/short strategies, arbitrage, or whatever, she leans into this strategy and hires an army of traders to implement it and a bunch more HR reps to keep the degeneracy to a minimum. Investors pour money in, and they just get better and better at the strategy until either 1) the fund blows up or 2).

Now, this is changing. Multi-strategy funds are the new, cool way to go. Basically, the opposite of what was described above, a multi-strategy fund involves hiring a bunch of traders who all have their own trading strategies. So, for example, one guy does global macro while the girl sitting next to him does capital structure arbitrage. It might seem like a small change, but this trend is essentially turning the industry on its head. 

The switch from depth to breadth for hedge funds does a few key things. First, it brings implicit hedging because while one strategy might be failing, maybe another strategy is killing it. Second, hedge fund applicants might up their chances of getting hired by mastering their own strategy first rather than mastering ass-kissing. Third, this is just another iteration of the trend of decentralization.

A New Era Of Smart Money